Reverting to our illustration in that transition which is the
underlying truth of the parable of 'The Prodigal Son,' namely the
transition from a relationship on the ground of law, in the flesh,
to that on the ground of grace, in the spirit, we have come to see
that his knowledge of the Father in the spirit was such as he had
never possessed before. He never knew his Father before grace was
revealed and the gift and operation of the Father's Spirit was
manifested as he knew Him afterward. His spirit had been brought
from death, darkness, distance, desolation, and now he had, not
merely an objective knowledge of one whom he had termed Father, but
a subjective understanding and appreciation of the Father because
the spirit of sonship had now been put within him whereby he cried
"Father." There is no saving relationship to, or knowledge of God
only through grace and by new birth. Such knowledge is spiritual not
"natural."
So, then, those who by being born again have become "little
children," Matthew 18:3, or "babes" in spiritual things, 1
Corinthians 3:1 (not wrong if we do not unduly remain so) have to
learn everything afresh because "all things are new," and - now -
"all things are out from God," 2 Corinthians 5:17-18. Such have to
learn a new kind of knowledge, as we have shown. But before this,
and ever and always, such have to learn to live by a new life - "to
walk in newness of life." This life is always related to the
resurrection of Christ, and is "the life whereby Jesus conquered
death." This subject is treated more fully elsewhere, especially in
booklet No. 2 of 'Incorporation into Christ' [published later as "In
Christ"] and we shall do no more than mention it here.
The Apostle Paul says that our conduct is to be "as those who are
alive from the dead," and so saying he means that the manifestation
in and by us is to be that of the shared power and triumph of the
mighty resurrection life of Christ. Again, in order that we may
learn how to live by this life, which is a superlative purpose of
God concerning us, He is bound to bring our natural life to an end
in all its effectiveness and value in the sphere of spiritual
achievement, both in life and service. We cannot be or do what God
requires: His life alone can produce after its kind. But while this
is a law and a test, it is also a blessed truth that Christ came
that we might have this life and have it abundantly. Head
through your New Testament with the object of seeing how the Divine
life is manifested by and in the enforced insufficiency of natural
life, and you will see it to be the secret of the romance of New
Testament accomplishments.
An element of offence in this teaching is that it demands a
recognised and acknowledged weakness; it requires that we have to
confess that in ourselves, for all Divine purposes, we are powerless
and worthless, and of ourselves we can do nothing. The natural man's
worship of strength, efficiency, fitness, ability meets with a
terrible rebuff when it is confronted with the declaration that the
universal triumph of Christ over hierarchies more mighty than those
of flesh and blood was because "He was crucified through weakness" -
God reduced to a certain impotence! - and "God hath chosen the weak
things to confound the mighty," 2 Corinthians 13:4, 1 Corinthians
1:27.
To "glory in infirmity that His power may be the more manifest" is a
far cry from the original Saul of Tarsus, but what an extraordinary
change in mentality! God has, however, always drawn a very broad
line between natural "might and power" on the one hand, and "My
Spirit" on the other; and for evermore the law abides that "He that
hateth his life (psuche, natural life) shall find it unto
life eternal (aionian-zoe, Divine life of the ages), John
12:25. This is said, of course, in relation to the interests of
Christ.
There are two other lessons that we might mention as being set for
the "new man," which are a part of the education and training of the
spirit or "inner man of the heart." He has to learn a new walk. Many
slips and, perhaps, tumbles may be his experience here, but such are honourable if they are marks of a stepping out at the behest of
God, rather than a sitting still in fleshly disobedience or fear.
The "Prodigal's" new relationship meant new shoes, and in later
significance this meant "walking after the spirit and not after the
flesh," Romans 8:4. We have shown that the nature of this walk is
that reason, feeling, and natural choice are no longer the directive
laws or criteria of the spiritual man. For such an one there are
frequent experiences of a collision and contradiction between soul
and spirit. The reason would dictate a certain course, the
affections would urge in a certain direction, the will would seek to
fulfil these judgments and desires, but there is a catch somewhere
within, a dull, leaden, lifeless, numbed something at the centre of
us which spoils everything, contradicts us, and all the time, in effect,
says no! Or it may be the other way round. An inward urge and
constraint, that finds no encouragement from our natural judgment or
reason, and is flatly contrary to our natural desires, likings,
inclinations, preferences, or affections; while in that same natural
realm we are not at all willing for such a course. In this case it
is not the judgment against the desire as is frequently the case in
everybody's life, but judgment, desire, and volition all joined
against intuition. Now is the crisis. Now is to be seen who is to
rule the life, or which road is to be chosen. Now the natural man or
the outer man of sense, and the spiritual or inner man have to
settle affairs. To learn to walk after the spirit is a life lesson
of the new man, and as he is vindicated, as he always will be in
the long run, he will come to take the absolute ascendency
over the "natural" man and his mind, and so by the energising of the
Holy Spirit in the spirit of the new man the Cross will be wrought
out to the nullifying of the mind of the flesh - which in spiritual
things always ends in death, and in the enthroning of the spiritual
mind which is life and peace, Romans 8:6.
This, then, is the nature of the walk after the spirit, and its
application is many-sided. But we must remember the law of this walk
which is faith. We "walk in the spirit," but "we walk by
faith."
To walk by faith there must in the very nature of the case, be a
stripping off of all that the outer man of the senses clings to,
demands, craves for, as a security and an assurance. When the
spiritual life of God's people is in the ascendent they are not
troubled by either the absence of human resources on the one hand,
or by the presence of humanly overwhelming odds against them on the
other. This is patent in their history as recorded in the
Scriptures. But it is also true that when the spiritual life is
weak, undeveloped, or at the ebb they look round for some tangible,
seen, resource upon which to fasten. Egypt is the alternative to God
whenever and wherever spiritual life is low. To believe in and trust
to the intuitive leadings of the Holy Spirit in our spirit, even
though all is so different from the ways of men, and even though
such bring us to a Canaan which for the time being is full of
idolatry and where a mighty famine reigns; where Satan seems to be
lord, and no fruit is found; where all is so contrary to what our
outer man had decided must be in keeping with a leading and a
promise of God; to leave our old sphere of life in the "world," to
break with our kindred, our father's house, for this - this!
and then have to wait through much continuous stripping off of those
means, and methods, and habits, and judgments, which are the very
constitution of the natural man - this is the law of the spiritual
walk; but this is God's chosen and appointed way of the mightiest
vindication.
Spiritual children and riches, and fruitfulness, and service,
permanence, and the friendship of God are for such Abrahams of faith
or such children of Abraham in the spirit. God has laid a faith
basis for His superstructure of spiritual glory, and only that which
is built upon such a foundation can serve spiritual ends. Let this
be the test of our walk in all personal, domestic, business, and
church affairs. Here, again, we have a principle which if applied
would be revolutionary, and would call for the abandonment of a
tremendous amount of carnal "natural," worldly stuff in our
resources and methods. "Faith without works is dead," true, but the
works of faith - of the spirit - are not those of the flesh, the
difference is incomparable. The walk of the flesh is one thing, but
the walk in the spirit is quite another. The things of the Spirit
are foolishness to the flesh. Men of faith see what others do not
and act accordingly. This also being true of men who have lost their
reason, the two are often confused and the children of the flesh
think the children of the spirit mad or insane. They are unable to
discriminate between even the insanity of men and "the foolishness
of God which is wiser than men."
Abraham was fortified by his faith, but his walk in faith was
intensely practical, though so different from the walk in the flesh.
A writer has said that faith brings us into difficulties which are
unknown to men who walk in the flesh or who never go out in faith,
but such difficulties placing us beyond the power of the flesh to
help, make special Divine revelations necessary, and God always
takes advantage of such times to give such needed education of the
spirit. It is thus that the men of the spirit are taught and come to
know God as no others know Him. Thus faith is the law of the walk of
the new man - the inner man - which brings him by successive stages
into the very heart of God, Who crowns this progress with the
matchless designation "My friend"!
One other thing in general has to be mentioned. The new man of the
spirit has to learn a new speech. There is the language of the
spirit, and he will have to realise increasingly that "speech in the
enticing words of man's wisdom," or what man calls "excellency of
speech" (1 Cor. 2:1) will avail nothing in spiritual service. If all
the religious speech and preaching and talking about the Gospel
which goes on in one week was the utterance of the Holy Spirit, what
tremendous impact of God upon the world would be registered. But it
is obviously not so and this impact is not felt. It is impossible to
speak in and by the Holy Spirit without something happening which is
related to Eternity. But this capacity belongs only to the "born of
the Spirit" ones, whose spirit has been joined to the Lord, and even
they have to learn how to cease from their own words and "speak as
they are moved by the Spirit." It is a part of the education of the
inner man to have his outer man slain in the matter of speech, and
to be brought to the state to which Jeremiah was brought "I am but
a child, I cannot speak."
Not only as sinners have we to be crucified with Christ, but as
preachers, or speakers, or talkers. The circumcision of Christ,
which Paul says is the the cutting off of the whole body of the
flesh, has to be applied to our lips, and our spirit has to be so
much in dominion that on all matters where God cannot be glorified
we "cannot speak." A natural facility of speech is no strength, in
itself to spiritual ministry, it may be a positive menace. It is a
stage of real spiritual development when there is a genuine fear of
speaking unless it is in "words which the Holy Ghost teacheth." On
the other hand a natural inability to speak need be no handicap. To
be present "in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling" (1 Cor.
1:3) may be a mood which becomes an apostolic, nay rather, a Holy
Spirit ministry. The utterance of God is a very different thing in
every way from that of men. How much is said in the Scriptures about
"conversation," "the tongue," "words," etc, and ever with the
emphasis that these are to be in charge of the spirit and not merely
expressions of the soul in any of its departments.
If it is true that only the quickened spirit can receive Divine
revelation, it is equally true that such revelation requires a
Divine gift of utterance in order to realise its spiritual end.
Many there are who preach or teach the truth as out from a mental
apprehension with the natural ability, but the vital potentialities
of that truth are not being manifest either in their own lives or in
the lives of those who hear. The spiritual results are hardly worth
the effort and expenditure. The virtue of speech resulting in
abiding fruit to the glory of God, whether that speech be preaching,
teaching, conversation, prayer, is not in its lucidity, eloquence,
subtlety, cleverness, wit, thoughtfulness, passion, earnestness,
forcefulness, pathos, etc, but only in that it is an utterance of
the Holy Ghost. "Thy speech betrayeth thee" may be applied in many ways, for whether
one lives in the flesh or in the spirit, in the natural man or in
the spiritual man will always be made manifest by how we speak and
the spiritual effect of the fruit of our lips.
Oh, for crucified lips amongst God's people, and oh for lips among
God's prophets touched with the blood-soaked fire-charged coal from
that one great altar of Calvary!
Having at some length dealt with the difference, nature, and
characteristics of the inner and the outer man, we must now come to
some specific emphases. The first of these is all inclusive, and
relates to
The Ascendency of the Spiritual Man Over the
Natural Man.
This is illustrated by a simple diagram. [See diagram entitled "The Inner Man of the Heart"]. There is marked the
creation of man in his tripartite being, with his spirit as the
sphere of his union with God for all Divine purposes. The nature of
this union is set forth below, and is fivefold. In the fall the soul
was allowed to take the ascendency over the spirit; the spirit with
conscience, communion, and intuition being subjected to the soul
with its reason, desire, and volition. This ascendency of the soul
made man what he is afterward called; the "natural," i.e., soulish
(Gk. psukikos) man, and in as much as the reasoning and
desiring and choosing were inspired and prompted by the devil, and
the capitulation was to him, and the spirit union with God was
rejected and violated in all its claims, the result is that man is
not only separated from God but in his natural state is horizoned by
a lower life than was intended. But more, he is then called "flesh,"
this is the active law of his fallen condition. It is not something
in him, it is himself, the real principle of his being, and is
always set over against "spirit" which is the real principle of life
re-united with God by re-generation.
Further, as he capitulated, not only to the soul life, but to the
devil, he is ever after, until delivered by Christ, actuated and
influenced by "the god of this age," whose methods are not always manifestly
against God, but are always in the place of God, even to the extent
of projecting a counterfeit religion, with similar phraseology and
means. The result of all this, as we have seen, is spirit, or
spiritual, death, and the nature of death in the Bible is primarily
the separation of the spirit from God. All else that is called death
results from this. Lost likeness, fellowship, knowledge,
co-operation, dominion, with all that God meant and intended by them
- this is the foundation of death. So thus "in Adam all died" "death
passed upon all." This may be represented by lines which narrow down
as they move towards the cross. This movement indicates how through
the Old Testament age God by types and figures is ever preaching the
fact that death is His sentence and must be carried out. There may
be seen also lines which widen out from the point of the fall and
death. These represent the natural man's mind about himself. He
refuses the Divine verdict and believing and preaching a gospel of
the inherent goodness of human nature seeks to develop a system of
improvement by all manner of means. For him salvation is in himself,
and civilisation, education, social reconstruction, mutual
improvement, etc, will at length bring in a golden age. He refutes
the word of God which demands new birth. He makes sin and evil a
negative thing, and so on. Thus man's estimate of himself is ever
growing, and the opposite of the mind of God.
In the centre of history God places the Cross and in the
representative Person of Christ gathers the whole race under His own
sentence and takes it into the full outworking thereof in death.
Down through the centre of the Cross is a black zero line. This
marks in God's settled judgment the end of the natural man. From
that point God has nothing to do with man only on the ground of that
life which is begotten from the dead (Rev. 1:5). He demands that
there shall be both an acceptance of and a witness born to the fact
that when Christ died we died, that we were "crucified with Christ,"
(Rom. 6:3-6, Col. 2:12, &c). This has been dealt with at length
in "Incorporation into Christ," No. 1. Then we come to this side of
the Cross and the lines cross once again. First there is the
beginning of the new man - the inner man - the spiritual man. He is
"begotten again by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead." 1 Peter
1:3. Here begins that spiritual life, walk, knowledge, etc, of which
we have spoken, and here therefore begins that life process by which
the new or spiritual man takes the ascendency over the old or
natural man by the power of the Cross.
As we "walk in the spirit" we cease to "fulfil the lusts of the
flesh." Thus in the spirit by the indwelling of God's Spirit there
is, through Calvary, a restoration, and more than a restoration, of
the lost likeness, fellowship, knowledge, co-operation, and
spiritual dominion.
As the spiritual and inner man is renewed, strengthened, educated,
the natural and outer man is brought into subjection and robbed of
his dominance, until slowly the soul is made the servant of the
renewed spirit, and the body is harnessed as the instrument for
doing what the soul has come to understand as the will of the
spirit, which in its turn has been "joined to the Lord One Spirit."
There is no time limit to this process or progress. Some have more
to unlearn than others. The spirits of many are not as pure as some
because they have been muffled and beclouded by much mental and
emotional apprehension. One often sees people in a meeting to whose
spirit very little gets through because they are judging with their
heads according to some accepted tenets, or they are prejudiced,
suspicious, biased, or the slaves of a system and not at liberty in
the spirit. It is a joy to meet a pure and open spirit. In this
sense we have to "turn and become as little children." How pure the
spirit of a child is! Therefore how true its intuitions or
discernment. Some of us remember now the judgment we passed upon
certain people when we were quite young. Our conclusions were quite
clear and definite, although we could never have stated them, but
looking back with the larger understanding, how perfectly right we
were, and time has only corroborated our "feelings." We did not
arrive at these by reasoning, or knowledge, or even studied
observation, we could never have given our reasons or explained
ourselves in the matter. There were the pure intuitions of an
un-beclouded spirit. Such is to be our state, not in the natural
but in the Divine realm. Lord, make us in this matter to have the
spirit of a child, for of such is the realm of the heavenlies!
We now see why it is that the Lord is primarily concerned with our
spirit. It is here that the new life resides; it is here that the
Holy Spirit operates: it is here that our true education takes
place: it is here that we have fellowship with God: it is here that
we are to be made strong: it is here that resistance to the enemy is
to be established: it is here that authority over malignant
spiritual forces is to function. It is this spirit possessed of the
resurrection life of Christ which is the germ of the resurrection
body; it is here that we are saved in trial: it is here that that
sinless, inviolate, life of God is (1 John 3:9, 5:18) not in our
"outer" or "old man." It is only as we come to the outer man that
the enemy has power over us.
May we just strike a note of warning here. There is a peril that we
might live too much in our own human spirit as a thing by itself.
For the born again child of God the Holy Spirit is the Divine
indweller of the human spirit, and it is not our spirit but His
presence in our spirit that has to be our direction and government.
A larger reason for this warning will be mentioned later, but as one
very vital principle for safety in this matter let us here emphasize
the corporate nature of the Holy Spirit's work. He is essentially
the gift to the Body of Christ as a whole, and only indwells
individual members relatively. It is Christ corporate Who is
anointed in this age to fulfil the eternal purpose, and the Holy
Spirit resting in and upon the "Body" (1 Cor. 12:12) energises and
endows each member in relation to the whole and to the "Head" (Eph.
1:22). Hence spiritual guidance should be corporate, and the
complement, corroboration, and confirmation should be sought in the
spirits of "two or three" members. This "discerning of the Body" (1
Cor. 10:16,17, 11:29) is very important in the matter of service as
in fellowship. God is jealous of proper order in the Body of Christ,
and failure to note this is the traceable cause of very much error,
chaos, and disruption; as also of failure, suffering, and shame.
There are also "joints of supply" in the "Body;" and while they do
not compose a priestly or ecclesiastical class or order, they are in
- by the appointment of God and the seal of the Spirit - a
representative position and capacity. God will not have these set
aside, but requires that those who are within the sphere of their
oversight (1 Peter 5:2, &c.) shall consult with them, "comparing
spiritual things with spiritual" in the matter of service and
conduct, as in matters of truth and doctrine. Where this is
possible, God locks up His direction to this law, and only trouble
can follow sooner or later if the law is ignored.
We must not overlook the Divine appointments within the "Body" (Eph.
4:11-14). These appointments were made and these personal gifts were
given for the "perfecting of the saints unto the work of ministry,
for the building up of the Body of Christ till" - till when,
the end of the Apostolic age? - "till we attain... unto the measure
of the stature of the fulness of Christ," and that has not taken
place yet.
