The Opened Heaven

by T. Austin-Sparks

Chapter 3 - Seated With Christ in the Heavenlies

"For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death" (Romans 8:2).

More literally this would read: "The Spirit's law of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and death."

Romans 8:5 more literally: "They that are after the Spirit have an inclination for the things of the Spirit."

Romans 8:9,10: "...the spirit is life". The noun is there. It is zoe and not zao, living. It is "... the spirit is life because of righteousness".

"For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed to us-ward" (Rom. 8:18).

Now there is a fragment of the great theme that is before us in these days which I feel to be of very special importance for our understanding and apprehension, and which is on my heart. You know that we are occupied very largely with the heavenly nature of the people of God; that it has ever been the Lord's mind for His own that they should here and now, while on the earth, be a heavenly people. And we have already, in our earlier chapters, arrived at the place in our contemplation of this truth where we have seen how we become a heavenly people. That is, we have seen our way through the Cross into our heavenly union with the Lord Jesus, to have now an opened heaven, and to know what it means to be seated together with Him in the heavenlies now.

We have seen that that Cross has made a way for man, imprisoned in his own state and in the power of the spirit of the kingdom of the world, and then also imprisoned within the authority of darkness, the Cross has made a way of escape through death into the heavenlies in Christ to be a present blessed reality.

This further fragment of so great importance has to do with what the Holy Spirit has really done when He has come to dwell within the born from above, born anew child of God. It is important for us to know that, and light should help us in this matter.

We know that being born from above, we receive the Spirit. The simple, emphatic declaration is: "But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His" (v.9). So that belonging to Christ, in this born anew sense, means that we have the Spirit of Christ. To have the Spirit of Christ means that we are the Lord's. But that fact of having received the Spirit carries with it so much that involves everything for the believer, and I want to go back over ground in the Old Testament, leading up to the New Testament in this connection, to seek to indicate this tremendous thing that the Holy Spirit implies for the people of God.

We go back to the tabernacle, and we remember that when all things had been constituted in the tabernacle of old according to the divinely revealed mind and heavenly plan, and all was set up and all was in order, the thing which set it all in motion and made it active (an energetic thing in fellowship with God livingly), was that the shekinah cloud of glory took its position over the most holy place forming, as it were, a pathway, an open road, a thoroughfare between that which was here and that which was in heaven, for God. It was the line of heaven's communication with man and the line of man's communication with heaven, and that glory filled the most holy place. The glory that was in heaven came to dwell in that which was here, but not as separated from heaven, but by an unbroken line of communication.

It was one glory not two glories, not a divided glory, but one glory. The link was complete, as with Jacob's ladder. The earth and the heaven - united by that ladder, becoming one - an open thoroughfare for the ascending and descending of what was of God. The same thing transpired in the case of the temple. When all things had been carried out according to the pattern which had been given David by the Spirit, then the glory of the Lord filled the House of the Lord, and once more you have the open heaven, so that that House became typically joined to heaven, and therefore, a heavenly house. It made no difference where it was. Literally it was on the earth, but proximity as a matter of geography did not count, it was virtually in heaven while on the earth.

Now you pass from the Old Testament to the New and you have a temple constituted on the earth in the person of one Man, the Lord Jesus. All things are according to the pattern, fulfilling all righteousness, that concerning which the voice from heaven could say: "I am well pleased"; perfectly satisfied, absolutely content. Then you have an opened heaven, the line of communication open, and the Spirit coming and lighting upon Him, linking Him with heaven by that one Spirit from the Father. Therefore, afterwards while walking here amidst earth scenes, pressed on every side by what He found here, nevertheless, as John the Baptist said, He was: "in the bosom of the Father" (John 1:18) while here. While He was still in the bosom of the Father in heaven He is, while here, in heaven.

Now, of course, if you give a literal mentality to these things, you cannot understand what that means, and in exactly the same way you cannot understand what the same Spirit means when He speaks of our now being seated together with Christ in the heavenlies.

But now perhaps you are beginning to see that by reason of a link in one Spirit Who moves through all, uninterrupted by any kind of interference, unlimited by the various conditions which encompass this earth, the Holy Spirit has His complete way through from the Father in heaven into the renewed and born-again spirit of the child of God. There is that opened way right from the centre of the child of God into heaven, and virtually, by reason of that Spirit, the believer is in heaven. And the church which is His Body is now virtually in heaven and is regarded by the Lord as in heaven. Here, yes! But in heaven in the Lord Jesus by the Spirit. The believer has been constituted a heavenly creature in that sense, and the church which is His Body has been constituted a heavenly church, which now, according to the fullest revelation that the Lord has given in His Word, is already spiritually in heaven.

The whole course of the believer's life and training and discipline in the hands of the Holy Spirit is to bring the believer to the place where He is; to bring believers to the place where they have already arrived. You cannot understand a thing like that. What the Lord is seeking to do is to make us what we are in Him, in His thought, and by reason of our having received the Spirit, we are a heavenly people, and we are in heaven. But oh, there is so much yet around us, wrapping us round, which is earthly, and we have got to know how to live our heavenly life, and how to live in ascendancy over all that which wraps us round, so that we make our heavenly life a reality.

In that connection there are two things that I want to say before I close. There is the wonderful effect of the Cross for us along two lines. Firstly, as to our own constitution, our own make-up, what we call here the kingdom of man: spirit, soul and body. And then there is the provision of the Cross for us as we have to move here in this world, and encounter and feel the impact of all that still encircles, but to which now we are not related as we were.

Then the effect of the Cross as to the kingdom of man, beginning with his spirit. What has the Holy Spirit constituted through the Cross as to man's spirit?

Well, first of all, of course, man's spirit has been constituted the vessel of life. In the born anew child of God, the spirit of man is not in darkness, but the spirit of man is illumined and has partaken of the heavenly life and corresponds with what is in heaven. And the Holy Spirit has come and taken up residence within that heavenly born spirit of man, and the Spirit operates by a law of Life. We have read: "The Spirit's law of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and death." So that the renewed spirit of man has been made the vessel of heavenly and divine Life, and inasmuch as that is so, the spirit of man has been made to correspond with the most holy place in the tabernacle or temple.

I think it is clear that the New Testament reveals two things as to the temple of God. One is the corporate temple, the church, or Body of believers that we are as collectively formed into and constituted the House of God. But the New Testament makes it equally clear that each individual believer is a temple of God, the temple of the Holy Spirit, a House of God. The corporate is only constituted by the number of individuals who themselves are living temples of God by His Spirit.

We are dealing now at this moment with the individual temple or tabernacle. And when the Holy Spirit takes up residence within the individual child of God, He constitutes the spirit of that child of God that which corresponds to the most holy place in the tabernacle, the place where the Lord dwells, the place where the heavenly light is, the place which is central to all the rest, and from which all the rest derives its power, its meaning, its knowledge, its understanding and its government. It is essentially the Godward place.

We come to the holy place and to the court, and we are moving outward, but the most holy place is peculiarly the Godward place. It is the oracle where God alone speaks and governs; where it is all the Lord and man is silent, where everything is unto the Lord and man has to stand back.

You remember when the glory of the Lord filled the House in the days of the dedication of the temple by Solomon, the priests had to go out, they could not stand. The glory of the Lord filled the House of God and the priests had to withdraw, which suggests that man has to stand back where God is all. And here is the place which is all towards the Lord and where the Lord has the first word and the last word and all the words. It is the central governing chamber and authority of everything else in the life. It is the heart which is undividedly and unreservedly the Lord's, and all the rest of the life will only have its clear direction from heaven, and heaven will only have its expression in all the rest of the life in so far as the heart is wholly unto the Lord, utterly governed by the Spirit of God, where in that central, most holy, inviolate place in the light, the Lord and the Lord only speaks, and is allowed to speak, and man (we ourselves) has to stand back, keep hands off, give way to the Lord. To press in there with anything of ourselves is to surely die. So it was then, and spiritual death is a very terrible thing.

Spiritual death holds sway, pervades, exercises itself just in the measure in which you and I as natural beings press into the place where God alone has sovereign rights, where we take into our hands what should be alone in the hands of God. Spiritual death follows. To touch the most holy place, which is the Lord's place alone, with any hand of natural life, means surely to die. This is the Godward place and how important it is, as we said at the outset, that every child of God should recognise that the Holy Spirit dwelling within them means that right at the very centre of their being, God dwells, with all the supreme rights of government and direction and that in so far as God has that place, and we stand back and let Him have His full place there, the law of the Spirit of Life makes free and we live.

This is simple, but it is of very practical value, for so many of us have known from time to time, spiritual crippling, straitening, limitation, paralysis, death, defeat, confusion, not knowing what to do, which way to turn - life an enigma and the Christian life an enigma. In the matter of our spiritual lives and in the matter of our service, our work, our vocation there is darkness, chaos, confusion, contradiction, limitation, paralysis, defeat and breakdown, and it may just be that the Lord is not having absolute right of way with us, not having His way fully and wholly. We have got judgments, ideas, preconceptions, traditions; we have got our own mind about things. We have not broken with an old order. The Cross has not been allowed to do that absolute cutting off from the whole old natural system, and these remnants and relics have been brought over and they are there, limiting God, limiting our own life, power and liberty. The glory of being men and women with an opened heaven has gone; it seems that heaven is closed.

Now I want to just introduce this governing factor lest some might be discouraged and even more perplexed by what I have said.

We do not always come instantly to the place where the Lord has absolute sway, because we have not got all the light necessary, but nevertheless the Lord deals with us in such a way that in the long run He definitely brings us to the place where we say: 'Lord, I take hands off, I open up fully and give You right of way, and whatever my preferences, feelings, ideas, judgments are, I let them all go. I give You a clear thoroughfare and I respond now to everything that You ask, that You require, whatever it is. I hold nothing back, I go all the way, I stop arguing.' That is the end of the Lord's ways with us, and then we have an opened heaven.

As we said in speaking of Nathanael, there may be those things which are not a part of our moral life in the sense that they are wrong, as with Nathanael. Yet he was a man who had caught onto a popular prejudice: "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" (John 1:46). Just taking on a popular prejudice without being morally damaged by it was a threat to his coming to the place where the Lord could say: "Ye shall see the heaven opened...". And if Nathanael had not been willing to deal with his prejudice and respond to the other disciple's invitation: "Come and see", and put the thing to a practical test, his popular prejudice would have kept him from the opened heaven.

There are things which have to be dealt with to get us to an opened heaven. But all the ways of the Lord with us are towards this: that really what the Holy Spirit indwelling a 'naos' (the inner part of a temple), a sanctuary, a most holy place, implies is a place where God and God alone speaks. It is for us God's end - an opened heaven and a clear way. That represents battles and conflicts, but if we have put ourselves into the Lord's hands, He deals with us in that way.

Oh, understand the Lord's dealings with you. You have put yourselves into the hands of the Lord, haven't you? You have said you want to be wholly, thoroughly, fully out with the Lord under an opened heaven, and you have challenged Him to make the Cross operative to its utmost to get you out into His fullest place. The Lord has commenced the line of operation with you and that may have driven you almost to the place of desperation, to the place where you feel it would be better if you could die. And that is what the Lord is trying to get you to do. But this dying is a desperate business. The spiritual issue is just that: whether we go out with our ideas, judgments, thoughts, preferences, likes, our considerations, our taking into account of what the religious world, the traditional Christian world is going to say of our action. We have not yet been delivered from that tyranny of the world.

The world has got into the whole religious system, the Christian system, and it operates in measure even in consecrated people. There is still that taint in many spiritual people of the world spirit and we register that and we are afraid of it. We are afraid of what they will think of us and say about us if we take a step which means a complete break where henceforth we are not governed by anything outside of ourselves, but by the Lord. And that consideration, that thought of what other people will say, holds us still and the Lord drives us to the point where we wish that we were dead. I mean literally so because the whole situation becomes so awful, so intolerable.

What is the Lord after? He is showing you that when you have a transaction with Him, an undertaking with Him, that He is to apply the Cross to its fullest meaning for the emancipation that comes under an opened heaven. You would know what it is to be absolutely emancipated from yourself, from the tyranny of the world spirit, of the power of darkness, and only the Lord in that realm is going to have government, and all the rest has to go out from His presence. It is an utter thing.

To be a child of God wholly and utterly means right at the centre of our being is put a most holy place, which is unto the Lord. That is implied with our new birth. It is not something which we ought to come to years after. The Lord would have that from the beginning. It was so in many cases in the New Testament right at the beginning of things. Unfortunately, nowadays we have a transaction on what we call 'the ground of full surrender', we come to realise we cannot go on without it, sometimes years after. Why wait so long?

Oh, that every new convert saw the implication of receiving the Spirit. The book of the Acts is a book of principles. We do not, and are not to look for a repetition in kind of everything that took place there, but we are to recognise that the principles were clothed with special forms at the beginning to give them emphasis, to show how important the Lord regarded those principles. And when the Holy Spirit came then, His coming and His presence was marked by peculiar and extraordinary accompaniments, but they were the Lord's ways of pointing out beyond any mistake how important it is for the Holy Spirit to be in absolute control. And we go back to our book of principles and see that when the Spirit came, He assumed the Mastery, He took charge and everything else had to go out.

Now the nature of the Lord's people is they have become heavenly, where only heavenly things govern. The sooner we approximate to what we are, the better. It is the way the Holy Spirit takes through the Cross to bring us to the opened heaven. The most holy place is set up.

"God hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Cor. 4:6, AV). That is the most holy place. The glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ in our hearts. Romans 8 speaks of those who are now not after the flesh, but after the Spirit, who are in the Spirit, and then it leads on to this: "...the glory which shall be revealed" (Rom. 8:18). That is the consummation of the heavenly way, the way of the Spirit. That is the fulfilment of what we have now in earnest and in implication by receiving the Spirit.

A brief word about the soul and the body in this connection. As to the soul, the soul of the believer who has received the Spirit is made to correspond with the holy place of the tabernacle. The soul, as we know, is the self-ward side of man's being; his spirit is the Godward side. That is, it is by his soul that he has self-consciousness, and has what is gathered up in the old Greek word of logic Cogito Ego: "I have, therefore I am" - self-consciousness.

Life is in the soul of man. It is the self-ward side inasmuch as you know by your soul that you have a personal being and a personality. Now the soul of the child of God is made to correspond with the holy place. In the most holy place you have God on His throne. Out from the most holy place that government goes through the holy place, and the soul receives its government, its control, its enlightenment and all that it requires for its life, conduct and service through the spirit. In the unregenerate man it is not so. He unconsciously derives direction, not from God in the most holy place, but from the world rulers of this darkness.

Man is blindly actuated by the world-rulers of this darkness and following the course of the god of this age, he thinks he is living his own life, but he is not. But now, the renewed child of God has natural life, his natural soul life comprised of his judgments, his reasonings, his desires, and his affections, his willings and his choosings. He has all these governed through his spirit where God dwells and he receives from the Lord, dwelling in His spirit, enlightenment for his mind, enlightenment of understanding, enlightenment of heart for his course and his conduct here. This is a very different thing from suspending all moral judgment and thinking that now you have the Holy Spirit in your spirit that that suspends all natural conscience and you have a higher law of life. Beware of that fallacy and that lie.

The Lord would have us rational, moral creatures, but elevated to a higher level of morals and conscience than the best among men, receiving light for our conscience and for our moral life from Himself. The Holy Spirit quickens conscience and does not dismiss conscience. Many a soul has made the most awful blunder and got into the most awful confusion by thinking they have received from the Lord a voice of direction which ran counter to the most obvious right conduct and right thing to do, suspending all accepted standards of conscience and integrity and righteousness. Never allow righteousness and integrity and what is obviously the conscientious thing to do to be set aside by any suggestion of a higher law; there is no safety in that course.

There is a difference, beloved, between moral integrity and our natural judgment as to courses to be adopted in which moral principles are not involved. You must recognise that difference; I do not want to get you into a network of confusion. The Holy Spirit does sometimes direct us to do what our common sense would not allow us to do, but the Holy Spirit never does direct us to do that which is clearly and obviously wrong. The Holy Spirit will never direct you to take your own life, or anybody else's life. That is an extreme situation, but you see the principle.

Now, the soul of man, his self-ward life, governed like the holy place from the most holy by the Spirit of the Lord, has to have illumination for judgment, illumination for action, purifying of affections, control of direction, all this coming into the hands of the Holy Spirit. But I want to remind you that in this heavenly tabernacle where things are perfect, there is no veil between; there is no middle wall of partition. That has been destroyed in the Lord Jesus, so that now in the saved, born from above child of God there is not an artificial division between soul and spirit, but there is the flowing of the one into the other. That is, there is the flowing of the spirit into our whole being. All our affections, thoughts, judgments and actions should just have the Spirit of the Lord flowing out from His presence into them and over them, and there should be no division between. He has removed that veil of division. And so we do not want to draw hard and fast distinctions about the tripartite nature of man. We want to realise that in the New Testament it comes out quite clearly that there is, as it were, an overflowing of that division. The Spirit of the Lord flows over the whole man and is not shut up in a watertight compartment in our being, and we are to have our whole being overflowed by the Spirit of the Lord.

I must close with one simple word about the body which is the world-ward side, which corresponds to the court. It is the place where the service takes place outwardly towards the world, and you and I must be very careful that we do not live only in the outward court. We must remember that we have a most holy place.

The danger for the Lord's servants especially, is to live in the outer court all the time, that is, to live in the world-ward activities of the spiritual life. Oh, what a big place these bodies of ours take in every sense. How they do get so often in our way, how they do interfere so much with what is spiritual. The danger for us is to be found continuously going on in the bodily, outward activity of Christian life and service and the result is always evil, always damaging. It means that the balance is upset altogether and we become lopsided and we have much less Life than we ought to have.

We must live with the Lord much, in the secret of His presence in the most holy place. We must derive for all outward activity our spiritual resources for our souls from the inner sanctuary with the Lord. So often in all the outward activities of our Christian lives we are aware of our need of resources to carry on and then we begin to apply ourselves to getting the means for carrying on. We begin to read books and study hard to get material for spiritual work. And there is a very great deal of difference beloved, between (I am speaking to the Lord's servants in particular) working at your books to get material with which to carry on your public service for the Lord, and going into the inner place with the Lord, shutting yourself up with the Lord and allowing Him to enlighten your mind and quicken your understanding and impart light to your soul.

I am not dismissing the necessity for reading God's Word, and anything that may be helpful, but if you are going to work simply with manuals, even though it be the Bible, you are going to lose Life. It is possible to work the Bible to death for yourself and for everybody else. I have listened to wonderful Bible addresses which have almost killed me; they had no Life at all. They were wonderful as work on the Bible, but - death: no open heaven. And we must be careful that we do not live too much in the outer court of the bodily, physical side of things in the Lord's service. I mean the brain just as much as the hand. We must have our life truly hid with Christ in God. We must live much in the most holy place with the Lord, the Spirit. We must keep in the heavenlies and fulfil all our ministry as out from the heavens.