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The Power of the Name

by T. Austin-Sparks

Chapter 3 -The False and the True Man

Reading: Ephesians 4:4-6, 13-15.

Let us note at the commencement of our meditation that Adam, through his complicity with Satan, became (both personally and racially) an altogether different being from what he was when God made him, and from what God intended him to become. We do not believe that Adam was all that he was intended to be when he was created. He was created with potentialities, and with a purpose, to become something more than he was; but he became altogether other than that. Spiritually and morally he became a different kind and type of being.

A change took place in his consciousness. He became possessed of a changed and different consciousness; a change took place in his mentality, a change took place in his capacity, and a change took place in his personality. Spiritually and morally in his consciousness, his mentality, his capacity, a change came about. Self-consciousness became the ruling and dominating force of his being. 'Self-consciousness' is used in the broader sense than the way in which it is sometimes used today. We speak of people being self-conscious when we mean that they are nervous, but we use the phrase in a much more general and absolute sense; we mean consciousness of self.

You will notice that the effect of his sin is immediate self-consciousness, so that God said to him: "Who told thee that thou wast naked?" Adam said: "I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself". "Who told you that? Where did you get that consciousness? How did you awake to the consciousness of that? You have become alive to yourself; you have risen into a place that you did not occupy before." It is at least a hint of another consciousness which is self-ward, about himself. That is not the full range of self-consciousness, but that is the suggestion, of a change of consciousness which is self-ward. "How do you know yourself? How did you rise into that place which has so dominated you, that has driven you to act like this in self-defence, self-preservation, self-interest?" Self has become the consciousness, and that was not there before.

In the soul self-consciousness works in three directions. Firstly, in the mental realm, that you can use your own mind. You have discovered that you have a mind, and you can use it; you call it reason, intellect. Secondly, you have also feelings, emotions, affections, desires, and you have discovered that you can use them, follow them, be governed by them. Thirdly, you have a will, and you can use it, be directed by it, governed by it, assert it, achieve by it. Human reason, human feeling, human will.

Now let us note that, while these things in themselves were not evil, not wrong, when Adam entered into this complicity with Satan, this self-consciousness was elevated to a place above the divine intention for it, and above the divine order of it. It is not wrong to have a mind, an intellect. It is not wrong to have a heart; it is not wrong to have a will; but when these are elevated to a position which they were never intended by God to occupy, that is where the wrong is. And the elevation of self-consciousness to a position which was never intended by God, and which therefore represented an upsetting of the order established by God, meant the man becomes something other than God made him and intended him to be; a different kind of being.

This elevation of the self-conscious life had a motive, and the motive indicates the wrong, or where the wrong entered in; the nature of the wrong. That motive became and remains the underlying force of human life in the first Adam. That motive is dominion, human dominion. The mind was used to assent, and although Adam may not have been conscious of exactly what he was doing, being deceived and acting under deception, he elevated his human mind above the mind of God. He elevated his human feelings above the desires of God. He elevated his human will above the will of God. It was dominion. It had come out of the devil, who had said: "I will exalt my throne above the stars... I will be equal with the Most High" (Isa. 14:13-14). That is the motive: elevation to equality with God, dominion.

This motive of dominion was not wrong in itself, for dominion was intended by God for man, but it was subverted by pride. It was subverted from God to man. Instead of having dominion in union with God, under God, it was having dominion independently of God, in himself. Thus it was the elevation of self.

Pride is the root of all evil, and means absolute apartness from God, "the proud He knows afar off" (Psa. 138:6). Pride is an abomination to God.

Redemption and Reconciliation

What is redemption and reconciliation unto? It is the putting away of that apartness, to result in union with God. Redemption and reconciliation are unto union. What does redemption and reconciliation mean, therefore? It must mean another kind of man from that which the first Adam now represented. There can be no union unless there is a return to God's kind of man; therefore, that man must disappear from God's sight, and God's kind of man must be introduced and brought back before there can be union between God and man.

This, as we know, has different aspects. On the one hand it means the end of the one type, the false man. It is a tremendously important thing for us to recognise that man in Adam is a false man. I wish you could get the full weight of that fact.

In Adam we are natural men, we go on in our blindness as though nothing had ever happened, and the very nature of our blindness is that we repudiate the fall. The deepest darkness, the most utter blindness, is found where the fall is most utterly ruled out, and we go on, and still argue, and talk religion. We make up a kind of religion of our own, about the universal Fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man, and that we are all children of God, by nature of God's creation. You will know that whole system of things, which ignores the fact that man in Adam is a fallen man, is not a true man.

Man by nature is not the man of God, he is a false man, and we are all a lie, a falsehood by nature, assuming, supposing, pretending to be something which we are not. We are other than that, and God knows us exactly as we are, and knows that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, and the deepest deceitfulness or deception of the heart is that man thinks himself to be what he is not. And therefore that man cannot come near God, cannot be accepted by God. He approaches God, and finds that God will not have him. That is the truest fact about the approach of any sinner to God in his sin; God will not have him. Until he has discovered that there is no hope for him (and the darkest hour in a man's history is the hour in which he discovers that God will not have him) and even when he has come under conviction of sin, and is abandoned, and is crying to God, very often God keeps him out there for a bit, he does not get through. For what purpose? To let that man know that as he is, there is no way in for him; he is not accepted, the door is closed.

God never accepts the old Adam, and tears and repentance have to be sifted out as to whether this old Adam is trying to get to God to get rid of his sin; not that he hates sin, but he has come up against the consequences of sin and is afraid. That is the false man, and God never accepts him. That self-motive, even in being saved, even in getting forgiveness, even in being delivered from sin, has got to be smitten, until the man cries from the depths of his being. It is not a matter of whether I escape the suffering, it is a matter of whether I escape sin, because sin is sin; and not because sin is against me, but because it is sin against God. That is the point to which man has to come.

Christ's teaching is always so utterly true to principle, and when He gave that parable of the prodigal, He was true to principle. When He at length got that young man returning to the Father, He made him say, not, "I have sinned against all the laws of humanity, sinned against myself, and am suffering from the consequences of my sin; receive me back and deliver me from my misery!" No! He said, "I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight!" That is the true nature of sin. A man never gets home until he recognises that sin is something more than injury to himself or to society. Sin is something which puts him away from God. It represents a type of man with whom God can have no dealings. So that this false man must be brought to an end, that one type must be finished with, it is not God's type of man at all.

Then, on the other hand, there must be the establishing of the true man before God.

These two things are two sides of Christ's present work. This also has different phases.

(a) The True Man Brought in, Tested and Approved

This is the Son of Man, who is also the Son of God. He comes in as Man, and He is brought in, or He comes in, as the true Man, God's true type, and being brought into the world, He is subjected to testing. He is tested, tried (or 'tempted' if you prefer that word), in all points like as we. Through testing He is proved. Then He is glorified. You see that side in the earthly life of the Lord Jesus, and you do not have to wait to see that Man go to heaven to be glorified. He is brought in, and there is a public presentation of Him, as it were, before heaven, earth, and hell. In His baptism, anointing, and temptation (three phases of one thing) you have heaven, earth, and hell involved, affected, interested, associated, and thus, as in the centre of the universe, He is presented.

Then He is tested by heaven. You must remember that, occupying in a spiritual sense a heavenly position, He was tested by all that was heavenly. If you and I take a heavenly position over everything, we shall be tested by that position which we have taken as to whether we will stand on that heavenly ground and refuse to come down on to earthly ground. It is one thing to say that we are seated together with Christ in the heavenlies, and it is another thing to refuse persistently to be governed by earthly laws and considerations, and consequently suffer because of the position that we have taken, and will not come down out of that position. If you prefer to use the word "spiritual" instead of "heavenly" it might help a little. You have taken a spiritual position that is heavenly, and now the very position which you have taken is the ground of your testing. Heaven tests you out according to its laws. The question is, will you live according to spiritual laws, or will you, under stress, under trial, under pressure, come down on to a lower level and break with your heavenly covenant?

Earth tested Him, and hell tested Him. He was universally tested as God's Man, and He was proved; that is, after the testing it was proved that He was the true Man that came down from heaven, that He was true to God's type, true to God's order, true to the mind of God about man, as to what man should be.

Being proved, He was glorified as Man. The Mount of Transfiguration sees the end, so far as the representation of what man according to the mind of God is, it is the end of the cycle of the true Man standing before God. His humanity was glorified, and for Himself there was every right at that moment to pass into heaven. At that moment there was nothing more to be done so far as He personally was concerned to give Him a rightful standing in the very presence of God in heaven as Man. Everything had been done, everything provided and secured that there should now be a Man in heaven glorified.

(b) The False Man Representatively Removed

From that moment He assumed another capacity. He stepped down from that which was His by personal right as Son of Man, to become representative of the other: the false man - not to become false man, but to become representative of this other man. To mention the false man strikes a harsh note, and may startle you, but it is no more startling than to say that He was made sin; not just that He took our sins, but He was made sin. That is even more terrible. He stooped down, then, from the Mount, to represent and voluntarily take the place of the false man, to bring that false man collectively, corporately, under God's full judgement and removal. So in His death He representatively removed the false man by the judgement of God. When we look upon Him in His cross we see God's attitude toward the first Adam, and what God has to say to and do with every member of Adam's race.

(c) The Seed of the True Man Brought Forth

In His resurrection, and through His resurrection, "He shall see His seed". That is brought out at Pentecost. The seed of the true Man is brought forth and raised up, with three aspects.

1. On the Basis of the Death and Resurrection of Christ

This seed is only brought forth, is only raised up, on the ground of His death and His resurrection; that is, its very being, its very existence, its very coming into being is governed by the fact that one order of man has been put aside, and another order has been brought in. Oh, if only the Lord's people would recognise that all the way through! It would make for a very different situation. There is such ignorance as to the difference that the cross of the Lord Jesus has made before God, and demands, in our consciousness.

We do not want to break in there with these words again, but you will see at once the meaning of a changed consciousness, because once you get into the true Man you have a different consciousness from the consciousness of the false man. This consciousness is born and maintained by the Holy Spirit, which says, regarding the old man every time he comes into view, that he is ruled out. If you let the old man in you get on to a false ground with God, you come into a false position. Is that not true in our knowledge of the outworking? Every time the flesh and the old nature, the Adam life, gets up in us and in any way controls an issue, we find ourselves upon false ground, which in its outworking means that we have not got hold of God; that is, we have no appeal to God, we have no ground of standing with God. It is no use praying. Heaven is closed when you are in that realm. You have no open way to God, you have no hold on God. If you want it you have to repudiate that old Adam element. It is not just a matter of getting forgiveness for something; it is repenting of getting on to that ground which is forbidden. You lose the consciousness of your clear way through and hold upon God. But here is this new consciousness in the risen man, a new consciousness, the difference between Adam and Christ. We will not follow that through for the moment.

On the basis of the death and resurrection of Christ the new, the true Man, is brought into being and stands.

2. Progressively Conformed to the Image of the True Man

We shall see in a moment more of what that means. In God's eyes he is not progressively conformed. In God's eyes the whole thing is absolute; that is, God does not leave any place for the old man. So far as we are concerned it is progressive conformity to the image of Christ so long as you and I walk in the light of Christ, walk according to Christ, walk according to the new consciousness which the Holy Spirit has given us as to the difference between Adam and Christ in us. While you and I go on in obedience to Christ, God lays to our account all the perfections of Christ. That is very important and necessary, because not one of us will be perfect on this earth. It will never be true of any man while he remains on this earth that he is perfect according to Christ.

We are being progressively conformed to the image of Christ, We shall never reach that perfection here on the earth, but when the Lord takes us from this earth, it will only take a moment of time to make us perfect. We shall be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, into the perfect likeness of Christ; that is, if we are obedient to the truth right up to the point where our knowledge of it ends. Our responsibility is to live up to all the light that we have if we want the rest put to our account. While we are on the earth our business is to grow in grace and in the knowledge of Him.

This is where the word from Ephesians has its place. "Till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ" (Eph. 4:13). The word 'knowledge' there means 'full knowledge'. Our responsibility is to grow up into Him in all things. That is our responsibility now. That is the progressive growth, development, and realisation of the true Man, Christ, in us, and we in Christ.

3. Fulness of Conformity

The instantaneous consummation of that will either be in being called out of the grave, or being called apart from the grave. We shall be changed in a moment.

In the True Man the False Life is Vetoed

In the true Man, the new Man, the false life, the deranged order, that wrong consciousness, mentality, capacity, personality, is vetoed and repudiated, and the right life, the right consciousness and mentality becomes dominant. The whole thing is reversed in Christ. Soul life or self-conscious life is made subject to the Spirit which is the divine order, which was deranged and upset, and is made subject to the Spirit which is God-conscious life.

Before Adam fell his consciousness was pre-eminently God-consciousness, afterward it was pre-eminently self-consciousness. In the reversing of the order in the New Man, the true Man, God-consciousness becomes dominant again, and self-consciousness is subjected to the spirit. That means that pride is changed for humility; arrogance is changed for meekness; assumption is changed for lowliness; vainglory is changed for simplicity. All this is seen in Christ. According to God the true man is a very humble man, a meek man, a lowly man, from whom all the traces of pride and arrogance and assumption and vainglory, and all such things, have been removed, overcome.

From God's standpoint that is a settled thing in finality where we are concerned, when we come into Christ. From our standpoint that has got to be made more and more true in a progressive way. That is the nature of discipline, chastening, child-training, unto the fruits of righteousness. Humility, meekness, the ornament of a meek and lowly spirit, are of great price in the sight of God. They are the marks of the new man, the marks of the victory in the Cross over Satan's interference with man. Self-strength is put away, and weakness with dependence, so far as we are concerned, become characteristics of our new manhood; in ourselves weak, in the Lord strong. But that is spiritual, it is not natural; that is divine, it is not human, in the old sense of humanity.

The wisdom of the world, the wisdom of man, the wisdom of nature are repudiated, and we become foolish in ourselves. We become fools for Christ's sake. Christ crucified is to the Greeks foolishness, but to them that believe He is the wisdom of God; but what weakness it is from the old Adam standpoint! There is a mentality which is utterly different between those in Christ and those out of Christ. It is no use trying to reconcile these things. There is a danger in it. In that strength of our human nature in the fall, we have tried to make a compromise here in order to influence the world, and we have done all sorts of things to try to convince robust people in the world that Christianity is a robust thing. That is hedging the thing.

No one appeals for that which we call effeminacy in Christianity, but if we are seeking to win the world by putting up to the world something that appeals to the world and its consciousness, its mentality, we are throwing away our position, we are getting onto the world's ground, and that is where Christendom is ensnared. The world cannot and never will be able to understand us. We had better accept that. The world will think that we are mad, a crowd of imbeciles. Are we going to repudiate that, or are we going to let the higher wisdom prove itself? When the world has burned itself out, it says to the Christian in the end: "You have been the wise person! You, after all, whom I thought to be so mad, were the sanest!"

We have to wait for vindication, but oh, the battle in ourselves so often to get to that point where we refuse any longer to try to be equal with men and the world. Let them think their thoughts. Leave them to their mentality. Do not in any wise compromise your position, and try to win them by going over on to their side. It cannot be done. The weakness and the foolishness of the Cross of Christ are the ultimate dominating factors of this universe, and the Lamb will overcome, will be on the throne.

So you see it is from the natural to the spiritual power and strength and wisdom that we see the transition in Christ.

The end that the Lord seems to have for us is this: God making Christ universal and everything, not as some Person far away, outside of the world, in heaven upon a throne, but in a corporate Body: in you, in me. Not as an official, but as a Life, a spiritual nature, a spiritual order. That is what God is after, and it governs everything in this sense: that our work is not official work, our ministry is not in any official way. It is not something we take up, something we enter into, something we engage in. Christianity is not a set of articles that we accept, assent to, believe in. The life of the Christian, the work, the ministry, and all that we have to do with, is that Christ shall be expressed in an ever-growing measure in us. And the measure of Christ is the deciding factor about everything; whether we are Christians or not, and whether we are ministers or not.

What we mean is this: that you and I have got to be in as full a measure of Christ as is possible in order to minister Christ. That ministry must simply, spontaneously grow or spring out of the measure of Christ, and if our ministry exceeds our measure of Christ, the Lord will have to keep bringing us back by painful experiences to get us abreast of what we are saying. He will have to deal with us in the light of the things that we say in order to bring the measure of Christ up to the measure of our utterance, otherwise there is a falsehood somewhere. The right way is that you and I should simply minister because we are in measure one with Christ. Thus we should not grasp at ministry as some thing, we should not regard ministry as something official, something to take up from the outside, but that we should be men and women with a measure of Christ, and accordingly give that which we have of Christ; not in our minds, in our heads, but have in our lives the measure of Christ. The measure in which Christ is our very life, our very being, constitutes ministry. I believe that is why the Lord would hold us back, and has held His servants back and not allowed them to rush into saying things that they have come to know about Him. It is much more important to live Christ than to talk Christ.

You see the object of the Lord: that everything should be Christ. The true man is that which is according to God's mind, and to that end He is dealing with us. His dealings are deep and drastic, and they are all intended to produce the true man after God, created in righteousness and true holiness.

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