The Two Covenants – by Andrew Murray
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Title: The Two Covenants
Creator(s): Murray, Andrew (1828-1917)
Print Basis: First published by London: J. Nisbet, 1899
Rights: Public Domain
CCEL Subjects: All; Non-Fiction;
LC Call no: BT155
LC Subjects:
Doctrinal theology
God
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THE TWO COVENANTS
AND
THE SECOND BLESSING
BY
ANDREW MURRAY
D.D.
SPIRE BOOKS
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
OLD TAPPAN, NEW JERSEY
ISBN 0-8007-8170-8
Printed in the United States of America
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INTRODUCTION
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IT is often said that the great aim of the preacher ought to be to
translate Scripture truth from its Jewish form into the language and
the thought of the nineteenth century, and so to make it intelligible
and acceptable to our ordinary Christians. It is to be feared that the
experiment will do more harm than good. In the course of the
translation the force of the original is lost. The scholar who trusts
to translations will never become a master of the language he wants to
learn. A race of Christians will be raised up, to whom the language of
God’s Word, and with that the God who spoke it, will be strange. In
the Scripture words not a little of Scripture truth will be lost. For
the true Christian life nothing is so healthful and invigorating as to
have each man come and study for himself the very words in which the
Holy Ghost has spoken.
One of the words of Scripture, which is almost going out of fashion,
is the word Covenant. There was a time when it was the keynote of the
theology and the Christian life of strong and holy men. We know how
deep in Scotland it entered into the national life and thought. It
made mighty men, to whom God, and His promise and power were
wonderfully real. It will be found still to bring strength and purpose
to those who will take the trouble to bring all their life under
control of the inspiring assurance that they are living in covenant
with a God who has sworn faithfully to fulfil in them every promise He
has given.
This book is a humble attempt to show what exactly the blessings are
that God has covenanted to bestow on us; what the assurance is the
Covenant gives that they must, and can, and will be fulfilled; what
the hold on God Himself is which it thus gives us; and what the
conditions are for the full and continual experience of its blessings.
I feel confident that if I can lead any to listen to what God has to
say to them of His Covenant, and to deal with Him as a Covenant God,
it will bring them strength and joy:
Not long ago I received from one of my correspondents a letter with
the following passage in it:–” I think you will excuse and understand
me when I say there is one further note of power I would like so much
to have introduced into your next book on Intercession. God Himself
has, I know, been giving me some direct teaching this winter upon the
place the New Covenant is to have in intercessory prayer . . . I know
you believe in the Covenant, and the Covenant rights we have on
account of it. Have you followed out your views of the Covenant as
they bear upon this subject of intercession? Am I wrong in coming to
the conclusion that we may come boldly into God’s presence, and not
only ask, but claim a Covenant right through Christ Jesus to all the
spiritual searching, and cleansing, and knowledge, and power promised
in the three great Covenant promises? If you would take the Covenant
and speak of it as God could enable you to speak, I think that would
be the quickest way the Lord could take to make His Church wake up to
the power He has put into our hands in giving us a Covenant. I would
be so glad if you would tell God’s people that they have a Covenant.”
Though this letter was not the occasion of the writing of the book,
and our Covenant rights have been considered in a far wider aspect
than their relation to prayer, I am persuaded that nothing will help
us more in our work of intercession, than the entrance for ourselves
personally into what it means that we have a Covenant God.
My one great desire has been to ask Christians whether they are really
seeking to find out what exactly God wants them to be, and is willing
to make them. It is only as they wait, “that the mind of the Lord may
be showed them,” that their faith can ever truly see, or accept, or
enjoy what God calls ” His salvation.” As long as we expect God to do
for us what we ask or think, we limit Him. When we believe that as
high as the heavens are above the earth, His thoughts are above our
thoughts, and wait on Him as God to do unto us according to His Word,
as He means it, we shall be prepared to live the truly supernatural,
heavenly life the Holy Spirit can work in us–the true Christ life.
May God lead every reader into the secret of His presence, and “show
him His Covenant.”
ANDREW MURRAY.
WELLINGTON, SOUTH AFRICA,
1st November 1898.
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THE TWO COVENANTS
CHAPTER I
A Covenant God
“Know therefore that the Lord thy God, He is God, the faithful God,
which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love Him and keep His
commandments.”-DEUT. vii. 9.
MEN often make covenants. They know the advantages to be derived from
them. As an end of enmity or uncertainty, as a statement of services
and benefits to be rendered, as a security for their certain
performance, as a bond of amity and goodwill, as a ground for perfect
confidence and friendship, a covenant has often been of unspeakable
value.
In His infinite condescension to our human weakness and need, there is
no possible way in which men pledge their faithfulness, that God has
not sought to make use of, to give us perfect confidence in Him, and
the full assurance of all that He, in His infinite riches and power as
God, has promised to do to us. It is with this view He has consented
to bind Himself by covenant, as if He could not be trusted. Blessed is
the man who truly knows God as his Covenant God; who knows what the
Covenant promises him; what unwavering confidence of expectation it
secures, that all its terms will be fulfilled to him; what a claim and
hold it gives him on the Covenant-keeping God Himself. To many a man,
who has never thought much of the Covenant, a true and living faith in
it would mean the transformation of his whole life. The full knowledge
of what God wants to do for him; the assurance that it will be done by
an Almighty Power; the being drawn to God Himself in personal
surrender, and dependence, and waiting to have it done; all this would
make the Covenant the very gate of heaven. May the Holy Spirit give us
some vision of its glory.
When God created man in His image and likeness, it was that he might
have a life as like His own as it was possible for a creature to live.
This was to be by God Himself living and working all in man. For this
man was to yield himself in loving dependence to the wonderful glory
of being the recipient, the bearer, the manifestation of a Divine
life. The one secret of man’s happiness was to be a trustful surrender
of his whole being to the willing and the working of God. When sin
entered, this relation to God was destroyed; when man had disobeyed,
he feared God and fled from Him. He no longer knew, or loved, or
trusted God.
Man could not save himself from the power of sin. If his redemption
was to be effected, God must do it all. And if God was to do it in
harmony with the law of man’s nature, man must be brought to desire
it, to yield his willing consent, and entrust himself to God. All that
God wanted man to do was, to believe in Him. What a man believes,
moves and rules his whole being, enters into him, and becomes part of
his very life. Salvation could only be by faith: God restoring the
life man had lost; man in faith yielding himself to God’s work and
will. The first great work of God with man was to get him to believe.
This work cost God more care and time and patience than we can easily
conceive. All the dealings with individual men, and with the people of
Israel, had just this one object, to teach men to trust Him. Where He
found faith He could do anything. Nothing dishonoured and grieved Him
so much as unbelief. Unbelief was the root of disobedience and every
sin; it made it impossible for God to do His work. The one thing God
sought to waken in men by promise and threatening, by mercy and
judgment, was faith.
Of the many devices of which God’s patient and condescending grace
made use to stir up and strengthen faith, one of the chief was–the
Covenant. In more than one way God sought to effect this by His
Covenant. First of all, His Covenant was always a revelation of His
purposes, holding out, in definite promise, what God was willing to
work in those with whom the Covenant was made. It was a Divine pattern
of the work God intended to do in their behalf, that they might know
what to desire and expect, that their faith might nourish itself with
the very things, though as yet unseen, which God was working out.
Then, the Covenant was meant to be a security and guarantee, as simple
and plain and humanlike as the Divine glory could make it, that the
very things which God had promised would indeed be brought to pass and
wrought out in those with whom He had entered into covenant. Amid all
delay and disappointment, and apparent failure of the Divine promises,
the Covenant was to be the anchor of the soul, pledging the Divine
veracity and faithfulness and unchangeableness for the certain
performance of what had been promised. And so the Covenant was, above
all, to give man a hold upon God, as the Covenant-keeping God, to link
him to God Himself in expectation and hope, to bring him to make God
Himself alone the portion and the strength of his soul.
Oh that we knew how God longs that we should trust Him, and how surely
His every promise must be fulfilled to those who do so! Oh that we
knew how it is owing to nothing but our unbelief that we cannot enter
into the possession of God’s promises, and that God cannot–yes,
cannot–do His mighty works in us, and for us, and through us! Oh that
we knew how one of the surest remedies for our unbelief-the divinely
chosen cure for it–is the Covenant into which God has entered with
us! The whole dispensation of the Spirit, the whole economy of grace
in Christ Jesus, the whole of our spiritual life, the whole of the
health and growth and strength of the Church, has been laid down and
provided for, and secured in the New Covenant. No wonder that, where
that Covenant, with its wonderful promises, is so little thought of,
its plea for an abounding and unhesitating confidence in God so little
understood, its claim upon the faithfulness of the Omnipotent God so
little tested; no wonder that Christian life should miss the joy and
the strength, the holiness and the heavenliness which God meant and so
clearly promised that it should have.
Let us listen to the words in which God’s Word calls us to know, and
worship, and trust our Covenant-keeping God–it may be we shall find
what we have been looking for: the deeper, the full experience of all
God’s grace can do in us. In our text Moses says: “Know therefore that
the Lord thy God, He is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant
with them that love Him.” Hear what God says in Isaiah: “The mountains
shall depart, and the hills be removed; but My kindness shall not
depart from thee, neither shall My covenant of peace be removed, saith
the Lord that hath mercy on thee.” More sure than any mountain is the
fulfilment of every Covenant promise. Of the New Covenant, in
Jeremiah, God speaks: “I will make an everlasting covenant with them,
that I will not turn away from them, to do them good; but I will put
My fear in their hearts, that they shall not depart from Me.” The
Covenant secures alike that God will not turn from us, nor we depart
from Him: He undertakes both for Himself and us.
Let us ask very earnestly whether the lack in our Christian life, and
specially in our faith, is not owing to the neglect of the Covenant.
We have not worshipped nor trusted the Covenant-keeping God. Our soul
has not done what God called us to–“to take hold of His Covenant,” “
to remember the Covenant”; is it wonder that our faith has failed and
come short of the blessing? God could not fulfil His promises in us.
If we will begin to examine into the terms of the Covenant, as the
title-deeds of our inheritance, and the riches we are to possess even
here on earth; if we will think of the certainty of their fulfilment,
more sure than the foundations of the everlasting mountains; if we
will turn to the God who has engaged to do all for us, who keepeth
covenant for ever, our life will become different from what it has
been; it can, and will be, all that God would make it.
The great lack of our religion is -we need more of God. We accept
salvation as His gift, and we do not know that the only object of
salvation, its chief blessing, is to fit us for, and bring us back to,
that close intercourse with God for which we were created, and in
which our glory in eternity will be found. All that God has ever done
for His people in making a covenant was always to bring them to
Himself as their chief, their only good, to teach them to trust in
Him, to delight in Him, to be one with Him. It cannot be otherwise. If
God indeed be nothing but a very fountain of goodness and glory, of
beauty and blessedness, the more we can have of His presence, the more
we conform to His will, the more we are engaged in His service, the
more we have Him ruling and working all in us, the more truly happy
shall we be. If God indeed be thereby Owner and Author of life and
strength, of holiness and happiness, and can alone give and work it in
us, the more we trust Him, and depend and wait on Him, the stronger
and the holier and the happier we shall be. And that only is a true
and good religious life, which brings us every day nearer to this God,
which makes us give up everything to have more of Him. No obedience
can be too strict, no dependence too absolute, no submission too
complete, no confidence too implicit, to a soul that is learning to
count God Himself its chief good, its exceeding joy.
In entering into covenant with us, God’s one object is to draw us to
Himself, to render us entirely dependent upon Himself, and so to bring
us into the right position and disposition in which He can fill us
with Himself, His love, and His blessedness. Let us undertake our
study of the New Covenant, in which, if we are believers, God is at
this moment living and walking with us, with the honest purpose and
surrender, at any price, to know what God wishes to be to us, to do in
us, and to have us be and do to Him. The New Covenant may become to us
one of the windows of heaven through which we see into the face, into
the very heart, of God.
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THE TWO COVENANTS
Chapter II
The Two Covenants: Their Relation
“It is written, that Abraham had two sons, one by the bondmaid, and
one by the freewoman. Howbeit, the one by the bondmaid is born after
the flesh; but the son by the freewoman is born through promise. Which
things contain an allegory: for these women are two covenants.” -GAL.
iv. 22-24.
THERE are two covenants, one called the Old, the other the New. God
speaks of this very distinctly in Jeremiah, where He says: “The days
come, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, not
after the covenant I made with their fathers” (Jer. xxxi.). This is
quoted in Hebrews, with the addition: “In that He saith a new
covenant, He hath made the first old.” Our Lord spoke Himself of the
New Covenant in His blood. In His dealings with His people, in His
working out His great redemption, it has pleased God that there should
be two covenants.
It has pleased Him, not as an arbitrary appointment, but for good and
wise reasons, which made it indispensably necessary that it should be
so, and no otherwise. The clearer our insight into the reasons, and
the Divine reasonableness, of there thus being two covenants, and into
their relation to each other, the more full and true can be our own
personal apprehension of what the New Covenant is meant to be to us.
They indicate two stages in God’s dealing with man; two ways of
serving God, a lower or elementary one of preparation and promise, a
higher or more advanced one of fulfilment and possession. As that in
which the true excellency of the second consists is opened up to us,
we can spiritually enter into what God has prepared for us. Let us try
and understand why there should have been two, neither less nor more.
The reason is to be found in the fact that, in religion, in all
intercourse between God and man, there are two parties, and that each
of these must have the opportunity to prove what their part is in the
Covenant. In the Old Covenant man had the opportunity given him to
prove what He could do, with the aid of all the means of grace God
could bestow. That Covenant ended in man proving his own
unfaithfulness and failure. In the New Covenant, God is to prove what
He can do with man, all unfaithful and feeble as he is, when He is
allowed and trusted to do all the work. The Old Covenant was one
dependent on man’s obedience, one which he could break, and did break
(Jer. xxxi. 32). The New Covenant was one which God has engaged shall
never be broken; He Himself keeps it and ensures our keeping it: so He
makes it an Everlasting Covenant.
It will repay us richly to look a little deeper into this. This
relation of God to fallen man in covenant is the same as it was to
unfallen man as Creator. And what was that relation? God proposed to
make a man in His own image and likeness. The chief glory of God is
that He has life in Himself; that He is independent of all else, and
owes what He is to Himself alone. If the image and likeness of God was
not to be a mere name, and man was really to be like God in the power
to make himself what he was to be, he must needs have the power of
free will and self-determination. This was the problem God had to
solve in man’s creation in His image. Man was to be a creature made by
God, and yet he was to be, as far as a creature could be, like God,
self-made. In all God’s treatment of man these two factors were ever
to be taken into account. God was ever to take the initiative, and be
to man the source of life. Man was ever to be the recipient, and yet
at the same time the disposer of the life God bestowed.
When man had fallen through sin, and God entered into a covenant of
salvation, these two sides of the relationship had still to be
maintained intact. God was ever to be the first, and man the second.
And yet man, as made in God’s image, was ever, as second, to have full
time and opportunity to appropriate or reject what God gave, to prove
how far he could help himself, and indeed be self-made. His absolute
dependence upon God was not to be forced upon him; if it was really to
be a thing of moral worth and true blessedness, it must be his
deliberate and voluntary choice. And this now is the reason why there
was a first and a second covenant, that in the first, man’s desires
and efforts might be fully awakened, and time given for him to make
full proof of what his human nature, with the aid of outward
instruction and miracles and means of grace, could accomplish. When
his utter impotence, his hopeless captivity under the power of sin had
been discovered, there came the New Covenant, in which God was to
reveal how man’s true liberty from sin and self and the creature, his
true nobility and God-likeness, was to be found in the most entire and
absolute dependence, in God’s being and doing all within him.
In the very nature of things there was no other way possible to God
than this in dealing with a being whom He had endowed with the Godlike
power of a will. And all the weight this reason for the Divine
procedure has in God’s dealing with His people as a whole, it equally
has in dealing with the individual. The two covenants represent two
stages of God’s education of man and of man’s seeking after God. The
progress and transition from the one to the other is not merely
chronological or historical; it is organic and spiritual. In greater
or lesser degree it is seen in every member of the body, as well as in
the body as a whole. Under the Old Covenant there were men in whom, by
anticipation, the powers of the coming redemption worked mightily. In
the New Covenant there are men in whom the spirit of the Old still
makes itself manifest. The New Testament proves, in some of its most
important epistles,–especially those to the Galatians, Romans, and
Hebrews,–how possible it is within the New Covenant still to be held
fast in the bondage of the Old.
This is the teaching of the passage from which our text is taken. In
the home of Abraham, the father of the faithful, Ishmael and Isaac are
both found–the one born of a slave, the other of a free woman; the
one after the flesh and the will of man, the other through the promise
and the power of God; the one only for a time, then to be cast out,
the other to be heir of all. A picture held up to the Galatians of the
life they were leading, as they trusted to the flesh and its religion,
making a fair show, and yet proved, by their being led captive to sin,
to be, not of the free but of the bond woman. Only through faith in
the promise and the mighty quickening power of God could they, could
any of them, be made truly and fully free, and stand in the freedom
with which Christ has made us free.
As we proceed to study the two covenants in the light of this and
other scriptures, we shall see how they are indeed the Divine
revelation of two systems of religious worship, each with its spirit
or life-principle ruling every man who professes to be a Christian. We
shall see how the one great cause of the feebleness of so many
Christians is just this, that the Old Covenant spirit of bondage still
has the mastery. And we shall see that nothing but a spiritual
insight, with a whole-hearted acceptance, and a living experience, of
all the New Covenant engages that God will work in us, can possibly
fit for walking as God would have us do.
This truth of there being two stages in our service of God, two
degrees of nearness in our worship, is typified in many things in the
Old Covenant worship; perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the
difference between the Holy Place and the Most Holy Place in the
temple, with the veil separating them. Into the former the priests
might always enter to draw near to God. And yet they might not come
too near; the veil kept them at a distance. To enter within that, was
death. Once a year the High Priest might enter, as a promise of the
time when the veil should be taken away and the full access to dwell
in God’s presence be given to His people. In Christ’s death the veil
of the temple was rent, and His blood gives us boldness and power to
enter into the Holiest of all and live there day by day in the
immediate presence of God. It is by the Holy Spirit, who issued forth
from that Holiest of all, where Christ had entered, to bring its life
to us, and make us one with it, that we can have the power to live and
walk alway with the consciousness of God’s presence in us.
It is thus not only in Abraham’s home that there were the types of the
two covenants, the spirit of bondage and the spirit of liberty, but
even in God’s home in the temple. The priests had not yet the liberty
of access into the Father’s presence. Not only among the Galatians,
but everywhere throughout the Church, there are to be found two
classes of Christians. Some are content with the mingled life, half
flesh and half spirit, half self-effort and half grace. Others are not
content with this, but are seeking with their whole heart to know to
the full what the deliverance from sin and what the abiding full power
for a walk in God’s presence is, which the New Covenant has brought
and can give. God help us all to be satisfied with nothing less. [1]
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[1] See Note A, on the Second Blessing.
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THE TWO COVENANTS
Chapter III
The First Covenant
“Now therefore, if ye will obey My voice, and keep My covenant, ye
shall be a peculiar treasure unto Me.”–EX. xix. 5.
“He declared unto you His covenant, which He commanded you to perform,
even ten commandments.”–DEUT. iv. 13.i
“If ye keep these judgments, the Lord thy God shall keep unto thee the
covenant,”–DEUT. vii. 12.
“I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, not according to
the covenant which I made with their fathers, which My covenant they
brake.”–JER. xxxi. 31, 32.
WE have seen how the reason for there being two Covenants is to be
found in the need of giving the Divine and the human will, each their
due place in the working out of man’s destiny. God ever takes the
initiative. Man must then have the opportunity to do his part, and to
prove either what he can do, or needs to have done for him. The Old
Covenant was on the one hand indispensably necessary to waken man’s
desires, to call forth his efforts, to deepen the sense of dependence
on God, to convince of his sin and impotence, and so to prepare him to
feel the need of the salvation of Christ. In the significant language
of Paul, “The law was our schoolmaster unto Christ.” “We were kept
under the law, shut up unto the faith, which should afterwards be
revealed.” To understand the Old Covenant aright we must ever remember
its two great characteristics –the one, that it was of Divine
appointment, fraught with much true blessing, and absolutely
indispensable for the working out of God’s purposes; the other, that
it was only provisional and preparatory to something higher, and
therefore absolutely insufficient for giving that full salvation which
man needs if his heart or the heart of God is to be satisfied.
Note now the terms of this first Covenant. “If ye will obey My voice
and keep My covenant, ye shall be unto Me a holy nation.” Or, as it is
expressed in Jeremiah (vii. 23, xi. 4), “Obey My voice, and I will be
your God.” Obedience everywhere, especially in the Book of
Deuteronomy, appears as the condition of blessing. ” A blessing if ye
obey” (xi. 27). Some may ask how God could make a covenant of which He
knew that man could not keep it. The answer opens up to us the whole
nature and object of the Covenant. All education, Divine or human,
ever deals with its pupils on the principle–faithfulness in the less
is essential to the attainment of the greater. In taking Israel into
His training, God dealt with them as men in whom, with all the ruin
sin had brought, there still was a conscience to judge of good and
evil, a heart capable of being stirred to long after God, and a will
to choose the good and to choose Himself. Before Christ and His
salvation could be revealed and understood and truly appreciated,
these faculties of man had to be stirred and wakened. The law took men
into its training, and sought, if I may use the expression, to make
the very best that could be made of them by external instruction. In
the provision made in the law for a symbolical atonement and pardon,
in all God’s revelation of Himself through priest and prophet and
king, in His interposition in providence and grace, everything was
done that He could do, to touch and win the heart of His people and to
give force to the appeal to their self-interest or their gratitude,
their fear or their love.
Its work was not without fruit. Under the law, administered by the
grace that ever accompanied it, there was trained up a number of men
whose great mark was the fear of God, and a desire to walk blameless
in all His commandments. And yet, as a whole, Scripture represents the
Old Covenant as a failure. The law had promised life; but it could not
give it (Deut. iv. 1; Gal. iii. 21). The real purpose for which God
had given it was the very opposite: it was meant by Him as “a
ministration of death.” He gave it that it might convince man of his
sin, and might so waken the confession of his impotence, and of his
need of a New Covenant and a true redemption. It is in this view that
Scripture uses such strong expressions–“By the law is the knowledge
of sin: that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may
become guilty before God.” “The law worketh wrath.” “The law entered,
that the offence might abound.” “That sin by the commandment might
appear exceeding sinful.” “As many as are of the works of the law are
under the curse.” “We were kept under the law, shut up to the faith,
which should afterwards be revealed.” “Wherefore the law was our
schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by
faith.” The great work of the law was to discover what sin was: its
hatefulness as accursed of God; its misery, working temporal and
eternal ruin; its power, binding man down in hopeless slavery; and the
need of a Divine interposition as the only hope of deliverance.
In studying the Old Covenant we ought ever to keep in mind the twofold
aspect under which we have seen that Scripture represents it. It was
God’s grace that gave Israel the law, and wrought with the law to make
it work out its purpose in individual believers and in the people as a
whole. The whole of the Old Covenant was a school of grace, an
elementary school, to prepare for the fulness of grace and truth in
Christ Jesus. A name is generally given to an object according to its
chief feature. And so the Old Covenant is called a ministration of
condemnation and death, not because there was no grace in it–it had
its own glory (2 Cor. iii. 10-12)–but because the law with its curse
was the predominating element. The combination of the two aspects we
find with especial clearness in Paul’s epistles. So he speaks of all
who are of the works of the law as under the curse (Gal. iii. 10). And
then almost immediately after he speaks of the law as being our
benefactor, a schoolmaster unto Christ, into whose charge, as to a
tutor or governor, we had been given, till the time appointed of the
Father. We are everywhere brought back to what we said above. The Old
Covenant is absolutely indispensable for the preparation work it had
to do; utterly insufficient to work for us a true or a full
redemption.
The two great lessons God would teach us by it are very simple. The
one is the lesson of SIN, the other the lesson of HOLINESS. The Old
Covenant attains its object only as it brings men to a sense of their
utter sinfulness and their hopeless impotence to deliver themselves.
As long as they have not learnt this, no offer of the New Covenant
life can lay hold of them. As long as an intense longing for
deliverance from sinning has not been wrought, they will naturally
fall back into the power of the law and the flesh. The holiness which
the New Covenant offers will rather terrify than attract them; the
life in the spirit of bondage appears to make more allowance for sin,
because obedience is declared to be impossible.
The other is the lesson of Holiness. In the New Covenant the Triune
God engages to do all. He undertakes to give and keep the new heart,
to give His own Spirit in it, to give the will and the power to obey
and do His will. As the one demand of the first Covenant was the sense
of sin, the one great demand of the New is faith that that need,
created by the discipline of God’s law, will be met in a Divine and
supernatural way. The law cannot work out its purpose, except as it
brings a man to lie guilty and helpless before the holiness of God.
There the New finds him, and reveals that same God, in His grace
accepting him and making him partaker of His holiness.
This book is written with a very practical purpose. Its object is to
help believers to know that wonderful New Covenant of grace which God
has made with them, and to lead them into the living and daily
enjoyment of the blessed life it secures them. The practical lesson
taught us by the fact that there was a first Covenant, that its one
special work was to convince of sin, and that without it the New
Covenant could not come, is just what many Christians need. At
conversion they were convinced of sin by the Holy Spirit. But this had
chiefly reference to the guilt of sin and, in some degree, to its
hatefulness. But a real knowledge of the power of sin, of their entire
and utter impotence to cast it out, or to work in themselves what is
good, is what they did not learn at once. And until they have learned
this, they cannot possibly enter fully into the blessing of the New
Covenant. It is when a man sees that, as little as he could raise
himself from the dead, can he make or keep his own soul alive, that he
becomes capable of appreciating the New Testament promise, and is made
willing to wait on God to do all in him.
Do you, my reader, feel that you are not fully living in the New
Covenant, that there is still somewhat of the Old-Covenant spirit of
bondage in you?–do come, and let the Old Covenant finish its work in
you. Accept its teaching, that all your efforts are failures. As, at
conversion, you were content to fall down as a condemned,
death-deserving sinner, be content now to sink down before God in the
confession that, as His redeemed child, you still feel yourself
utterly impotent to do and be what you see He asks of you. And begin
to ask whether the New Covenant has not perhaps a provision you have
never yet understood for meeting your impotence and giving you the
strength to do what is well-pleasing to God. You will find the
wonderful answer in the assurance that God, by His Holy Spirit,
undertakes to work everything in you. The longing to be delivered from
the life of daily sinning, and the extinction of all hope to secure
this by our efforts as Christians, will prepare us for understanding
and accepting God’s new way of salvation–Himself working in us all
that is pleasing in His sight.
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THE TWO COVENANTS
CHAPTER IV
The New Covenant
“But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel;
After those days, saith the Lord, I will put My law in their inward
parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they
shall be My people. And they shall teach no more every man his
neighbour, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know Me, from the
least of them unto the greatest of them, for I will forgive their
iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”–JER. xxxi. 33, 34.
ISAIAH has often been called the evangelical prophet, for the
wonderful clearness with which he announces the coming Redeemer, both
in His humiliation and suffering, and in the glory of the kingdom He
was to establish. And yet it was given to Jeremiah, in this passage,
and to Ezekiel, in the parallel one, to foretell what would actually
be the outcome of the Redeemer’s work and the essential character of
the salvation He was to effect, with a distinctness which is nowhere
found in the older prophet. In words which the New Testament (Hebrews
viii.) takes as the divinely inspired revelation of what the New
Covenant is of which Christ is the Mediator, God’s plan is revealed
and we are shown what it is that He will do in us, to make us fit and
worthy of being the people of which He is the God. Through the whole
of the Old Covenant there was always one trouble: man’s heart was not
right with God. In the New Covenant the evil is to be remedied. Its
central promise is a heart delighting in God’s law and capable of
knowing and holding fellowship with Him. Let us mark the fourfold
blessing spoken of.
1. “I will put My law in their inward parts, and write it in their
hearts.” Let us understand this well. In our inward parts, or in our
heart, there are no separate chambers in which the law can be put,
while the rest of the heart can be given up to other things; the heart
is a unity. Nor are the inward parts and the heart like a house, which
can be filled with things of an entirely different nature from what
the walls are made of, without any living organic connection. No; the
inward parts, the heart, are the disposition, the love, the will, the
life. Nothing can be put into the heart, and especially by God,
without entering and taking possession of it, without securing its
affection and controlling its whole being. And this is what God
undertakes to do in the power of His divine life and operation, to
breathe the very spirit of His law into and through the whole inward
being. “I will put it into their inward parts, and write it in their
hearts.” At Sinai the tables of the Covenant, with the law written on
them, were of stone, as a lasting substance. It is easy to know what
that means. The stone was wholly set apart for this one thing–to
carry and show this Divine writing. The writing and the stone were
inseparably connected. And so the heart in which God gets His way, and
writes His law in power, lives only and wholly to carry that writing,
and is unchangeably identified with it. So alone can God realise His
purpose in creation, and have His child of one mind and one spirit
with Himself, delighting in doing His will. When the Old Covenant with
the law graven on stone had done its work in the discovering and
condemning of SIN, the New Covenant would give in its stead the life
of obedience and true holiness of heart. The whole of the Covenant
blessing centres in this–the heart being put right and fitted to know
God: “I will give them an heart to know Me, that I am the Lord; and
they shall be My people, and I will be their God; for they shall
return unto Me with their whole heart” (Jer. xxiv. 7).
2. “And I will be their God, and they shall be My people.” Do not pass
these words lightly. They occur chiefly in Jeremiah and Ezekiel in
connection with the promise of the everlasting Covenant. They express
the very highest experience of the Covenant relationship. It is only
when His people learn to love and obey His law, when their heart and
life are together wholly devoted to Him and His will, that He can be
to them the altogether inconceivable blessing which these words
express, “I will be your God.” All I am and have as God shall be
yours. All you can need or wish for in a God, I will be to you. In the
fullest meaning of the word, I, the Omnipresent, will be ever present
with you, in all My grace and love. I, the Almighty One, will each
moment work all in you by My mighty power. I, the Thrice-Holy One,
will reveal My sanctifying life within you. I will be your God. And ye
shall be My people, saved and blessed, ruled and guided and provided
for by Me, known and seen to be indeed the people of the Holy One, the
God of glory. Only let us give our hearts time to meditate and wait
for the Holy Spirit to work in us all that these words mean.
3. “And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every
man his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for they shall all know Me,
from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord.”
Individual personal fellowship with God, for the feeblest and the
least, is to be the wonderful privilege of every member of the New
Covenant people. Each one will know the Lord. That does not mean the
knowledge of the mind,–that is not the equal privilege of all, and
that in itself may hinder the fellowship more than help it,–but with
that knowledge which means appropriation and assimilation, and which
is eternal life. As the Son knew the Father because He was one with
Him and dwelt in Him, the child of God will receive by the Holy Spirit
that spiritual illumination which will make God to him the One he
knows best, because he loves Him most and lives in Him. The promise,
“They shall be all taught of God,” will be fulfilled by the Holy
Spirit’s teaching. God will speak to each out of His Word what he
needs to know.
4. “For I will forgive their iniquities, and I will remember their sin
no more.” The word for shows that this is the reason of all that
precedes. Because the blood of this New Covenant was of such infinite
worth, and its Mediator and High Priest in heaven of such Divine
power, there is promised in it such a Divine blotting out of sin that
God cannot remember it. It is this entire blotting out of sin that
cleanses and sets us free from its power, so that God can write His
law in our hearts, and show Himself in power as our God, and by His
Spirit reveal to us His deep things–the deep mystery of Himself and
His love. It is the atonement and redemption of Jesus Christ wrought
without us and for us, that has removed every obstacle and made it
meet for God, and made us meet, that the law in the heart, and the
claim on our God, and the knowledge of Him, should now be our daily
life and our eternal portion.
Here we now have the Divine summary of the New Covenant inheritance.
The last-named blessing, the pardon of sin, is the first in order, the
root of all. The second, having God as our God, and the third, the
Divine teaching, are the fruit. The tree itself that grows on this
root, and bears such fruit, is what is named first–the law in the
heart. [2]
The central demand of the Old Covenant, Obey My voice, and I will be
your God, has now been met. With the law written in the heart, He can
be our God, and we shall be His people. Perfect harmony with God’s
will, holiness in heart and life, is the only thing that can satisfy
God’s heart or ours. And it is this the New Covenant gives in Divine
power, “I wil give them an heart to know Me; and I will be their God,
and they shall be My people; for they shall turn to Me with their
whole heart.” It is on the state of the heart, it is on the new heart,
as given by God, that the New Covenant life hinges.
But why, if all this is meant to be literally and exactly true of
God’s people, why do we see so little of this life, experience so
little in ourselves? There is but one answer: Because of your
unbelief! We have spoken of the relation of God and man in creation as
what the New Covenant is meant to make possible and real. But the law
cannot be repealed that God will not compel. He can only fulfil His
purpose as the heart is willing and accepts His offer. In the New
Covenant all is of faith. Let us turn away from what human wisdom and
human experience may say, and ask God Himself to teach us what His
Covenant means. If we persevere in this prayer in a humble and
teachable spirit, we can count most certainly on its promise: “They
shall no more every man teach his neighbour: Know the Lord, for they
shall all know Me.” The teaching of God Himself, by the Holy Spirit,
to make us understand what He says to us in His Word, is our Covenant
right. Let us count upon it. It is only by a God-given faith that we
can appropriate these God-given promises. And it is only by a
God-given teaching and inward illumination that we can see their
meaning, so as to believe them. When God teaches us the meaning of His
promises in a heart yielded to His Holy Spirit, then alone we can
believe and receive them in a power which makes them a reality in our
life.
But is it really possible, amid the wear and tear of daily life, to
walk in the experience of these blessings? Are they really meant for
all God’s children? Let us rather ask the question, Is it possible for
God to do what He has promised? The one part of the promise we
believe–the complete and perfect pardon of sin. Why should we not
believe the other part–the law written in the heart, and the direct
Divine fellowship and teaching? We have been so accustomed to separate
what God has joined together, the objective, outward work of His Son,
and the subjective, inward work of His Spirit, that we consider the
glory of the New Covenant above the Old to consist chiefly in the
redeeming work of Christ for us, and not equally in the sanctifying
work of the Spirit in us. It is owing to this ignorance and unbelief
of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, as the power through whom God
fulfils the New Covenant promises, that we do not really expect them
to be made true to us.
Do let us turn our hearts away from all past experience of failure, as
caused by nothing but unbelief; do let us admit fully and heartily,
what failure has taught us, the absolute impossibility of even a
regenerate man walking in God’s law in his own strength, and then turn
our hearts quietly and trustfully to our own Covenant God. Let us hear
what He says He will do for us, and believe Him; let us rest on His
unchangeable faithfulness and the surety of the Covenant, on His
Almighty power and the Holy Spirit working in us; and let us give up
ourselves to Him as our God. He will prove that what He has done for
us in Christ is not one whit more wonderful than what He will do in us
every day by the Spirit of Christ.
_________________________________________________________________
[2] On the law written in the heart, see Note B.
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THE TWO COVENANTS
CHAPTER V
The Two Covenants in Christian Experience
“These women are two covenants: one from Mount Sinai, bearing children
unto bondage, which is Hagar. Now this Hagar answereth to Jerusalem
that now is, for she is in bondage with her children. But the
Jerusalem which is above is free, which is our mother. So then,
brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free. With
freedom did Christ set us free. Stand fast, therefore, and be not
entangled again in a yoke of bondage.”-GAL. iv. 24-81, v. 1.
THE house of Abraham was the Church of God of that age. The division
in his house, one son, his own son, but born after the flesh, the
other after the promise, was a divinely-ordained manifestation of the
division there would be in all ages between the children of the
bondwoman, those who served God in the spirit of bondage, and those
who were children of the free, and served Him in the Spirit of His
Son. The passage teaches us what the whole Epistle confirms: that the
Galatians had become entangled with a yoke of bondage, and were not
standing fast in the freedom with which Christ makes free indeed.
Instead of living in the New Covenant, in the Jerusalem which is from
above, in the liberty which the Holy Spirit gives, their whole walk
proved that, though Christians, they were of the Old Covenant, which
bringeth forth children unto bondage. The passage teaches us the great
truth, which it is of the utmost consequence for us to apprehend
thoroughly, that a man, with a measure of the knowledge and experience
of the grace of God, may prove, by a legal spirit, that he is yet
practically, to a large extent, under the Old Covenant. And it will
show us, with wonderful clearness; what the proofs are of the absence
of the true New Covenant life.
A careful study of the Epistle shows us that the difference between
the two Covenants is seen in three things. The law and its works is
contrasted with the hearing of faith, the flesh and its religion with
the flesh crucified, the impotence to good with a walk in the liberty
and the power of the Spirit. May the Holy Spirit reveal to us this
twofold life.
The first antithesis we find in Paul’s words, “Received ye the Spirit
by the works of the law, or the hearing of faith?” These Galatians had
indeed been born into the New Covenant; they had received the Holy
Spirit. But they had been led away by Jewish teachers, and, though
they had been justified by faith, they were seeking to be sanctified
by works; they were looking for the maintenance and the growth of
their Christian life to the observance of the law. They had not
understood that, equally with the beginning, the progress of the
Divine life is alone by faith, day by day receiving its strength from
Christ alone; that in Jesus Christ nothing avails but faith working by
love.
Almost every believer makes the same mistake as the Galatian
Christians. Very few learn at conversion at once that it is only by
faith that we stand, and walk, and live. They have no conception of
the meaning of Paul’s teaching about being dead to the law, freed from
the law–about the freedom with which Christ makes us free. “As many
as are led by the Spirit are not under the law.” Regarding the law as
a Divine ordinance for our direction, they consider themselves
prepared and fitted by conversion to take up the fulfilment of the law
as a natural duty. They know not that, in the New Covenant, the law
written in the heart needs an unceasing faith in a Divine power, to
enable us by a Divine power to keep it. They cannot understand that it
is not to the law, but to a Living Person, that we are now bound, and
that our obedience and holiness are only possible by the unceasing
faith in His power ever working in us. It is only when this is seen,
that we are prepared truly to live in the New Covenant.
The second word, that reveals the Old Covenant spirit, is the word
“flesh.” Its contrast is, the flesh crucified. Paul asks: “Are ye so
foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are ye made perfect in the
flesh?” Flesh means our sinful human nature. At his conversion the
Christian has generally no conception of the terrible evil of his
nature, and the subtlety with which it offers itself to take part in
the service of God. It may be most willing and diligent in God’s
service for a time; it may devise numberless observances for making
His worship pleasing and attractive; and yet this may be all only what
Paul calls “making a fair show in the flesh,” “glorying in the flesh,”
in man’s will and man’s efforts. This power of the religious flesh is
one of the great marks of the Old Covenant religion; it misses the
deep humility and spirituality of the true worship of God–a heart and
life entirely dependent upon Him.
The proof that our religion is very much that of the religious flesh,
is that the sinful flesh will be found to flourish along with it. It
was thus with the Galatians. While they were making a fair show in the
flesh, and glorying in it, their daily life was full of bitterness and
envy and hatred, and other sins. They were biting and devouring one
another. Religious flesh and sinful flesh are one: no wonder that,
with a great deal of religion, temper and selfishness and worldliness
are so often found side by side. The religion of the flesh cannot
conquer sin.
What a contrast to the religion of the New Covenant! What is the place
the flesh has there? “They that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh,
with its desires and affections.” Scripture speaks of the will of the
flesh, the mind of the flesh, the lust of the flesh; all this the true
believer has seen to be condemned and crucified in Christ: he has
given it over to the death. He not only accepts the Cross, with its
bearing of the curse, and its redemption from it, as his entrance into
life; he glories in it as his only power day by day to overcome the
flesh and the world. “I am crucified with Christ.” “God forbid that I
should glory save in the cross of my Lord Jesus Christ, by which I am
crucified to the world.” Even as nothing less than the death of Christ
was needed to inaugurate the New Covenant, and the resurrection life
that animates it, there is no entrance into the true New Covenant life
other than by a partaking of that death.
“Fallen from grace.” This is a third word that describes the condition
of these Galatians in that bondage in which they were really impotent
to all true good. Paul is not speaking of a final falling away here,
for he still addresses them as Christians, but of their having
wandered from that walk in the way of enabling and sanctifying grace,
in which a Christian can get the victory over sin. As long as grace is
principally connected with pardon and the entrance to the Christian
life, the flesh is the only power in which to serve and work. But when
we know what exceeding abundance of grace has been provided, and how
God “makes all grace abound, that we may abound to all good works,” we
know that, as it is by faith, so too it is by grace alone that we
stand a single moment or take a single step.
The contrast to this life of impotence and failure is found in the one
word, “the Spirit.” “If ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the
law,” with its demand on your own strength. “Walk in the Spirit, and
ye shall not”–a definite, certain promise–“ye shall not fulfil the
lusts of the flesh.” The Spirit gives liberty from the law, from the
flesh, from sin. “The fruit of the Spirit is love, peace, joy.” Of the
New Covenant promise, “I will put My Spirit within you, and I will
cause you to walk in My statutes, and ye shall keep My judgments,” the
Spirit is the centre and the sum. He is the power of the supernatural
life of true obedience and holiness.
And what would have been the course that the Galatians would have
taken if they had accepted this teaching of St. Paul? As they hear his
question, “Now that ye have come to know God, how turn ye back again
into the weak and beggarly rudiments, whereunto ye desire to be in
bondage again?” they would have felt that there was but one course.
Nothing else could help them but at once to turn back again to the
path they had left. At the point where they had left it, they could
enter again. With any one of them who wished to do so, this turning
away from the Old Covenant legal spirit, and the renewed surrender to
the Mediator of the New Covenant, could be the act of a moment–one
single step. As the light of the New Covenant promise dawned upon him,
and he saw how Christ was to be all, and faith all, and the Holy
Spirit in the heart all, and the faithfulness of a Covenant-keeping
God all in all, he would feel that he had but one thing to do–in
utter impotence to yield himself to God, and in simple faith to count
upon Him to perform what He had spoken. In Christian experience there
may be still the Old Covenant life of bondage and failure. In
Christian experience there may be a life that gives way entirely to
the New Covenant grace and spirit. In Christian experience, when the
true vision has been received of what the New Covenant means, a faith
that rests fully on the Mediator of the New Covenant can enter at once
into the life which the Covenant secures.
I cannot too earnestly beg all believers who long to know to the
utmost what the grace of God can work in them, to study carefully the
question as to whether the acknowledgment that our being in the
bondage of the Old Covenant is the reason of our failure, and whether
a clear insight into the possibility of an entire change in our
relation to God, is not what is needed to give us the help we seek. We
may be seeking for our growth in a more diligent use of the means of
grace, and a more earnest striving to live in accordance with God’s
will, and yet entirely fail. The reason is, that there is a secret
root of evil which must be removed. That root is the spirit of
bondage, the legal spirit of self-effort, which hinders that humble
faith that knows that God will work all, and yields to Him to do it.
That spirit may be found amidst very great zeal for God’s service, and
very earnest prayer for His grace; it does not enjoy the rest of
faith, and cannot overcome sin, because it does not stand in the
liberty with which Christ has made us free, and does not know that
where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. There the soul can
say: “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus bath made me free
from the law of sin and death.” When once we admit heartily, not only
that there are failings in our life, but that there is something
radically wrong that can be changed, we shall turn with a new
interest, with a deeper confession of ignorance and impotence, with a
hope that looks to God alone for teaching and strength, to find that
in the New Covenant there is an actual provision for every need.
_________________________________________________________________
THE TWO COVENANTS
CHAPTER VI
The Everlasting Covenant
of the Spirit
“They shall be My people, and l will be their God. And I will make an
everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn away from them,
to do them good; but I will put My fear in their hearts, that they
shall not depart from Me.”–JER. xxxii. 38, 40.
“A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within
you: and I will take the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will
give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and
cause you to walk in My statutes, and ye shall keep My judgments, and
do them. Moreover, I will make a covenant of peace with them: it shall
be an everlasting covenant with them.”–EZEK. xxxvi. 26, 27, xxxvii.
26.
WE have had the words of the institution of the New Covenant. Let us
listen to the further teaching we have concerning it in Jeremiah and
Ezekiel, where God speaks of it as an everlasting Covenant. In every
covenant there are two parties. And the very foundation of a covenant
rests on the thought that each party is to be faithful to the part it
has undertaken to perform. Unfaithfulness on either side breaks the
covenant.
It was thus with the Old Covenant. God had said to Israel, Obey My
voice, and I will be your God (Jer. vii. 23, xi. 4). These simple
words contained the whole Covenant. And when Israel disobeyed, the
Covenant was broken. The question of Israel being able or not able to
obey was not taken into consideration: disobedience forfeited the
privileges of the Covenant.
If a New Covenant were to be made, and if that was to be better than
the Old, this was the one thing to be provided for. No New Covenant
could be of any profit unless provision were made for securing
obedience. Obedience there must be. God as Creator could never take
His creatures into His favour and fellowship, except they obeyed Him.
The thing would have been an impossibility. If the New Covenant is to
be better than the Old, if it is to be an everlasting Covenant, never
to be broken, it must make some sufficient provision for securing the
obedience of the Covenant people. And this is indeed the glory of the
New Covenant, the glory that excelleth, that this provision has been
made. In a way that no human thought could have devised, by a
stipulation that never entered into any human covenant, by an
undertaking in which God’s infinite condescension and power and
faithfulness are to be most wonderfully exhibited, by a supernatural
mystery of Divine wisdom and grace, the New Covenant provides a
guarantee, not only for God’s faithfulness, but for man’s too! And
this in no other way than by God Himself undertaking to secure man’s
part as well as His own. Do try and get hold of this.
It is just because this, the essential part of the New Covenant, so
exceeds and confounds all human thoughts of what a covenant means,
that Christians, from the Galatians downwards, have not been able to
see and believe what the New Covenant really brings. They have thought
that human unfaithfulness was a factor permanently to be reckoned with
as something utterly unconquerable and incurable, and that the
possibility of a life of obedience, with the witness from within of a
good conscience, and from above of God’s pleasure, was not to be
expected. They have therefore sought to stir the mind to its utmost by
arguments and motives, and never realised how the Holy Spirit is to be
the unceasing, universal, all-sufficient worker of everything that has
to be wrought by the Christian.
Let us beseech God earnestly that He would reveal to us by the Holy
Spirit the things that He hath prepared for them that love Him; things
that have not entered into the heart of man; the wonderful life of the
New Covenant. All depends upon our knowledge of what God will work in
us. Listen to what God says in Jeremiah of the two parts of His
everlasting Covenant, shortly after He had announced the New Covenant,
and in further elucidation of it. The central thought of that, that
the heart is to be put right, is here reiterated and confirmed. “I
will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn away
from them, to do them good.” That is, God will be unchangeably
faithful. He will not turn from us. “But I will put My fear into their
heart, that they shall not depart from Me.” This is the second half:
Israel will be unchangeably faithful too. And that because God will so
put His fear in their heart, that they shall not depart from Him. As
little as God will turn from them, will they depart from Him! As
faithfully as He undertakes for the fulfilment of His part, will He
undertake for the fulfilment of their part, that they shall not depart
from Him!
Listen to God’s word in Ezekiel, in regard to one of the terms of His
Covenant of peace, His everlasting Covenant. (Ezek. xxxiv. 25, xxxvi.
27, xxxvii. 26): “I will put My Spirit within you, and cause you to
walk in My statutes, and ye shall keep My judgments, and do them.” In
the Old Covenant we have nothing of this sort. You have, on the
contrary, from the story of the golden calf and the breaking of the
Tables of the Covenant onward, the sad fact of continual departure
from God. We find God longing for what He would so fain have seen, but
was not to be found. “O that there were such an heart in them, that
they would fear Me, and keep all My commandments always” (Deut. v.
29). We find throughout the Book of Deuteronomy, a thing without
parallel in the history of any religion or religious lawgiver, that
Moses most distinctly prophesies their forsaking of God, with the
terrible curses and dispersion that would come upon them. It is only
at the close of his threatenings (Deut. xxx. 6) that he gives the
promise of the new time that would come: “The Lord thy God will
circumcise thine heart, to love the Lord thy God with all thine heart,
and with all thy soul, and thou shalt obey the voice of the Lord thy
God.” The whole Old Covenant was dependent on man’s faithfulness: “The
Lord thy God keepeth covenant with them that keep His commandments.”
God’s keeping the Covenant availed little, if man did not keep it.
Nothing could help man until the “If ye shall diligently keep” of the
law, was replaced by the word of promise, “I will put My Spirit in
you, and ye shall keep My judgments, and do them.” The one supreme
difference of the New Covenant; the one thing for which the Mediator,
and the Blood, and the Spirit were given; the one fruit God sought and
Himself engaged to bring forth was this: a heart filled with His fear
and love, a heart to cleave unto Him and not depart from Him, a heart
in which His Spirit and His law dwells, a heart that delights to do
His will.
Here is the inmost secret of the New Covenant. It deals with the heart
of man in a way of Divine power. It not only appeals to the heart by
every motive of fear or love, of duty or gratitude. That the law also
did. But it reveals God Himself, cleansing our heart and making it
new, changing it entirely from a stony heart into a heart of flesh, a
tender, living, loving heart, putting His Spirit within it, and so, by
His Almighty Power and Love, breathing and working in it, making the
promise true, “I will cause you to walk in My statutes, and ye shall
keep My judgments.” A heart in perfect harmony with Himself, a life
and walk in His way–God has engaged in Covenant to work this in us.
He undertakes for our part in the Covenant as much as for His own.
This is nothing but the restoration of the original relation between
God and the man He had made in His likeness. He was on earth to be the
very image of God, because God was to live and to work all in him, and
he to find his glory and blessedness in thus owing all to God. This is
the exceeding glory of the New Covenant, of the Pentecostal
dispensation, that by the Holy Spirit God could now again be the
indwelling life of His people, and so make the promise a reality: “I
will cause you to walk in My statutes.”
With God’s presence secured to us every moment of the day–“I will not
turn away from them”; with God’s “fear put into our heart” by His own
Spirit, and our heart thus responding to His holy presence; with our
hearts thus made right with God, we can, we shall walk in His
statutes, and keep His judgments.
My brethren, the great sin of Israel under the Old Covenant, that by
which they greatly grieved Him, was this: “they limited the Holy One
of Israel.” Under the New Covenant there is no less danger of this
sin. It makes it impossible for God to fulfil His promises. Let us
seek, above everything, for the Holy Spirit’s teaching, to show us
exactly what God has established the New Covenant for, that we may
honour Him by believing all that His love has prepared for us.
And if we ask for the cause of the unbelief, that prevents the
fulfilment of the promise, we shall find that it is not far to seek.
It is, in most cases, the lack of desire for the promised blessing. In
all who came to Jesus on earth the intensity of their desire for the
healing they needed made them ready and glad to believe in His word.
Where the law has done its full work, where the actual desire to be
freed from every sin is strong, and masters the heart, the promise of
the New Covenant, when once really understood, comes like bread to a
famishing man. The subtle unbelief, that thinks it impossible to be
kept from sinning, cuts away the power of accepting the provision of
the everlasting Covenant. God’s Word, “I will put My fear in their
heart, that they shall not depart from Me”; “I will put My Spirit
within you, and ye shall keep My judgment,” is understood in some
feeble sense, according to our experience, and not according to what
the Word and what God means. And the soul settles down into a despair,
or a self-contentment, that says it can never be otherwise, and makes
true conviction for sin impossible.
Let me say to every reader who would fain be able to believe fully all
that God says: Cherish every whisper of the conscience and of the
Spirit that convinces of sin. Whatever it be, a hasty temper, a sharp
word, an unloving or impatient thought, anything of selfishness or
self-will–cherish that which condemns it in you, as part of the
schooling that is to bring you to Christ and the full possession of
His salvation. The New Covenant is meant to meet the need for a power
of not sinning, which the Old could not give. Come with that need; it
will prepare and open the heart for all the everlasting Covenant
secures you. It will bring you to that humble and entire dependence
upon God in His Omnipotence and His Faithfulness, in which He can and
will work all He has promised.
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THE TWO COVENANTS
CHAPTER VII
The New Covenant: A Ministration
of the Spirit
“Ye are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink,
but with the Spirit of the living God; not on tables of stone, but on
tables that are hearts of flesh . . . Our sufficiency is of God; who
also made us sufficient as ministers of the New Covenant; not of the
letter, but of the Spirit: for the letter killeth, but the Spirit
giveth life. For if the ministration of death came with glory, how
shall not rather the ministration of the Spirit be with glory? For if
the ministration of condemnation is glory, much rather doth the
ministration of righteousness exceed in glory.”–2 COR. iii. 3, 6-10.
IN this wonderful chapter Paul reminds the Corinthians, in speaking of
his ministry among them, of what its chief characteristics were. As a
ministry of the New Covenant he contrasts it, and the whole
dispensation of which it is part, with that of the Old. The Old was
graven in stone, the New in the heart. The Old could be written in
ink, and was in the letter that killeth; the New, of the Spirit that
maketh alive. The Old was a ministration of condemnation and death;
the New, of righteousness and life. The Old indeed bad its glory, for
it was of Divine appointment, and brought its Divine blessing; but it
was a glory that passed away, and had no glory by reason of the glory
that excelleth, the exceeding glory of that which remaineth. With the
Old there was the veil on the heart; in the New, the veil is taken
away from the face and the heart, the Spirit of the Lord gives
liberty, and, reflecting with unveiled face the glory of the Lord, we
are changed from glory to glory, into the same image, as by the Spirit
of the Lord. The glory that excelleth proved its power in this, that
it not only marked the dispensation on its Divine side, but so exerted
its power in the heart and life of its subjects, that it was seen in
them too, as they were changed by the Spirit into Christ’s image, from
glory to glory.
Think a moment of the contrast. The Old Covenant was of the letter
that killeth. The law came with its literal instruction, and sought by
the knowledge it gave of God’s will to appeal to man’s fear and his
love, to his natural powers of mind and conscience and will. It spoke
to him as if he could obey, that it might convince him of what he did
not know, that he could not obey. And so it fulfilled its mission:
“The commandment which was unto life, this I found to be unto death.”
In the New, on the contrary, how different was everything. Instead of
the letter, the Spirit that giveth life, that breathes the very life
of God, the life of heaven into us. Instead of a law graven in stone,
the law written in the heart, worked into the heart’s affection and
powers, making it one with them. Instead of the vain attempt to work
from without inward, the Spirit and the law are put into the inward
parts, thence to work outward in life and walk.
This passage brings into view that which is the distinctive blessing
of the New Covenant. In working out our salvation God bestowed upon us
two wonderful gifts. We read: “God sent forth His Son, that He might
redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the
adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit
of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.” Here we have the
two parts of God’s work in salvation. The one, the more objective,
what He did that we might become His children–He sent forth His Son.
The second, the more subjective, what He did that we might live like
His children: He sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts. In
the former we have the external manifestation of the work of
redemption; in the other, its inward appropriation; the former for the
sake of the latter. These two halves form one great whole, and may not
be separated.
In the promises of the New Covenant, as we find them in Jeremiah and
Ezekiel, as well as in our text and many other passages of Scripture,
it is manifest that God’s great object in salvation is to get
possession of the heart. The heart is the real life; with the heart a
man loves, and wills, and acts; the heart makes the man. God made
man’s heart for His own dwelling, that in it He might reveal His love
and His glory. God sent Christ to accomplish a redemption by which
man’s heart could be won back to Him; nothing but that could satisfy
God. And that is what is accomplished when the Holy Spirit makes the
heart of God’s child what it should be. The whole work of Christ’s
redemption–His Atonement and Victory, His Exaltation and
Intercession, His glory at the right hand of God–all these are only
preparatory to what is the chief triumph of His grace: the renewal of
the heart to be the temple of God. Through Christ God gives the Holy
Spirit to glorify Him in the heart, by working there all that He has
done and is doing for the soul.
In a great deal of our religious teaching a fear, lest we should
derogate from the honour of Christ, has been alleged as the reason for
giving His work for us, on the Cross or in heaven, a greater
prominence than His work in our heart by the Holy Spirit. The result
has been that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and His mighty work
as the life of the heart, as very little known in true power. If we
look carefully at what the New Covenant promises mean, we shall see
how the “sending forth of the Spirit of His Son into our hearts” is
indeed the consummation and crown of Christ’s redeeming work. Let us
just think of what these promises imply.
In the Old Covenant man had failed in what he had to do. In the New,
God is to do everything in him. The Old could only convict of sin. The
New is to put it away and cleanse the heart from its filthiness. In
the Old it was the heart that was wrong; for the New a new heart is
provided, into which God puts His fear and His law and His love. The
Old demanded, but failed to secure obedience; in the New, God causes
us to walk in His judgments. The New is to fit man for a true
holiness, a true fulfilment of the law of loving God with the whole
heart, and our neighbours as ourselves, a walk truly well-pleasing to
God. The New changes a man from glory to glory after the image of
Christ. All because the Spirit of God’s Son is given into the heart.
The Old gave no power: in the New all is by the Spirit, the mighty
power of God. As complete as the reign and power of Christ on the
throne of heaven, is His dominion on the throne of the heart by His
Holy Spirit given to us. [3] .
It is as we bring all these traits of the New Covenant life together
into one focus, and look at the heart of God’s child as the object of
this mighty redemption, that we shall begin to understand what is
secured to us, and what it is that we are to expect from our Covenant
God. We shall see wherein the glory of the ministration of the Spirit
consists, even in this, that God can fill our heart with His love, and
make it His abode.
We are accustomed to say, and truly so, that the worth of the Son of
God, who came to die for us, is the measure of the worth of the soul
in God’s sight, and of the greatness of the work that had to be done
to save it. Let us even so see, that the Divine glory of the Holy
Spirit, the Spirit of the Father and the Son, is the measure of God’s
longing to have our heart wholly for Himself, of the glory of the work
that is to be wrought within us, of the power by which that work will
be accomplished.
We shall see how the glory of the ministration of the Spirit is no
other than the glory of the Lord, as it is not only in heaven, but
resting upon us and dwelling in us, and changing us into the same
image from glory to glory. The inconceivable glory of our exalted Lord
in heaven has its counterpart here on earth in the exceeding glory of
the Holy Spirit who glorifies Him in us, who lays His glory on us, as
He changes us into His likeness.
The New Covenant has no power to save and to bless except as it is a
ministration of the Spirit. That Spirit works in lesser or greater
degree, as He is neglected and grieved, or yielded to and trusted. Let
us honour Him, and give Him His place as the Spirit of the New
Covenant, by expecting and accepting all He waits to do for us.
He is the great gift of the Covenant. His coming from heaven was the
proof that the Mediator of the Covenant was on the throne in glory,
and could now make us partakers of the heavenly life.
He is the only teacher of what the Covenant means: dwelling in our
heart, He wakens there the thought and the desire for what God has
prepared for us.
He is the Spirit of faith, who enables us to believe the otherwise
incomprehensible blessing and power in which the New Covenant works,
and to claim it as our own.
He is the Spirit of grace and of power, by whom the obedience of the
Covenant and the fellowship with God can be maintained without
interruption.
He Himself is the Possessor and the Bearer and the Communicator of all
the Covenant promises, the Revealer and the Glorifier of Jesus, its
Mediator and Surety.
To believe fully in the Holy Spirit, as the present and abiding and
all-comprehending gift of the New Covenant, has been to many a one an
entrance into its fulness of blessing.
Begin at once, child of God, to give the Holy Spirit the place in thy
religion He has in God’s plan. Be still before God, and believe that
He is within thee, and ask the Father to work in thee through Him.
Regard thyself, thy spirit as well as thy body, with holy reverence as
His temple. Let the consciousness of His holy presence and working
fill thee with holy calm and fear. And be sure that all that God calls
thee to be, Christ through His Spirit will work in thee.
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[3] See Note C, on George Muller.
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THE TWO COVENANTS
CHAPTER VIII
The Two Covenants: the Transition
“Now the God of peace, who brought again from the dead the great
Shepherd of the sheep, in the blood of the everlasting covenant, even
our Lord Jesus, make you perfect in every good thing to do His will,
working in us that which is well-pleasing in His sight, through Jesus
Christ.”–HEB. xiii. 20, 21.
THE transition from the Old Covenant to the New was not slow or
gradual, but by a tremendous crisis. Nothing less than the death of
Christ was the close of the Old. Nothing less than His resurrection
from the dead, through the blood of the everlasting Covenant, the
opening of the New. The path of preparation that led up to the crisis
was long and slow; the rending of the veil, that symbolised the end of
the old worship, was the work of a moment. By a death, once for all,
Christ’s work, as fulfiller of law and prophets, as the end of the
law, was for ever finished. By a resurrection in the power of an
endless life, the Covenant of Life was ushered in.
These events have an infinite significance, as revealing the character
of the Covenants they are related to. The death of Christ shows the
true nature of the Old Covenant. It is elsewhere called “a
ministration of death” (2 Cor. iii. 7). It brought forth nothing but
death. It ended in death; only by death could the life that had been
lived under it be brought to an end. The New was to be a Covenant of
Life; it had its birth in the omnipotent resurrection power that
brought Christ from the dead; its one mark and blessing is, that all
it gives comes, not only as a promise, but as an experience, in the
power of an endless life. The Death reveals the utter inefficacy and
insufficiency of the Old; the Life brings nigh and imparts to us for
ever all that the New has to offer. An insight into the completeness
of the transition, as seen in Christ, prepares us for apprehending the
reality of the change in our life, when, “like as Christ was raised
from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also walk in newness
of life.” The complete difference between the life in the Old and the
New is remarkably illustrated by a previous passage in the Epistle
(Heb. ix. 16). After having said that a death for the redemption of
transgressions had to take place ere the New Covenant could be
established, the writer adds, “Where a testament is, there must of
necessity be the death of him that made it.” [4] Before any heir can
obtain the legacy, its first owner, the testator, must have died. The
old proprietorship, the old life, must disappear entirely before the
new heir, the new life, can enter upon the inheritance. Nothing but
death can work the transference of the property. It is even so with
Christ, with the Old and the New Covenant life, with our own
deliverance from the Old and our entrance on the New. Now, having been
made dead to the law by the body of Christ, we have been discharged
from the law, having died to that wherein we were holden–here is the
completeness of the deliverance from Christ’s side; “so that we serve
“–here is the completeness of the change in our experience–“in
newness of the spirit, and not in oldness of the letter.”
The transition, if it is to be real and whole, must take place by a
death. As with Christ the Mediator of the Covenant, so with His
people, the heirs of the Covenant. In Him we are dead to sin; in Him
we are dead to the law. Just as Adam died to God, and we inherit a
nature actually and really dead in sin, dead to God and His kingdom,
so in Christ we died to sin, and inherit a nature actually dead to sin
and its dominion. It is when the Holy Spirit reveals and makes real to
us this death to sin and to the law too, as the one condition of a
life to God, that the transition from the Old to the New Covenant can
be fully realised in us. The Old was, and was meant to be, a
“ministration of death “; until it has completely done its work in us
there is no complete discharge from its power. The man who sees that
self is incurably evil and must die; who gives self utterly to death
as he sinks before God in utter impotence and the surrender to His
working; who consents to death with Christ on the cross as his desert,
and in faith accepts it as his only deliverance; he alone is prepared
to be led by the Holy Spirit into the full enjoyment of the New
Covenant life. He will learn to understand how completely death makes
an end to all self-effort, and how, as he lives in Christ to God,
everything henceforth is to be the work of God Himself.
See how beautifully our text brings out this truth, that just as much
as Christ’s resurrection out of death was the work of God Himself, is
our life equally to be wholly God’s own work too. Not more direct and
wonderful than was in Christ the transition from death to life, is to
be in us the experience of what the New Covenant life is to bring.
Notice the subject of the two verses. In ver. 20 we have what God has
done in raising Christ from the dead; in ver. 21, what God is to do in
us, working in us what is pleasing to Him. (20) “The God of peace, who
brought from the dead that great Shepherd of the sheep, even our Lord
Jesus, (21) Make you perfect in every good thing to do His will,
working in you that which is pleasing in His sight, through Jesus
Christ.” We have the name of our Lord Jesus twice. In the first case
it refers to what God has done to Christ for us, raising Him; in the
second, to what God is doing through Christ in us, working His
pleasure in us. Because it is the same God continuing in us the work
He began in Christ, it is in us just what it was in Christ. In
Christ’s death we see Him in utter impotence allowing and counting
upon God to work all and give Him life. God wrought the wonderful
transition. In us we see the same; it is only as we give ourself unto
that death too, as we entirely cease from self and its works, as we
lie, as in the grave, waiting for God to work all, that the God of
resurrection life can work in us all His good pleasure.
It was “through the blood of the everlasting Covenant,” with its
atonement for sin, and its destruction of sin’s power, that God
effected that resurrection. It is through that same blood that we are
redeemed and freed from the power of sin, and made partakers of
Christ’s resurrection life. The more we study the New Covenant, the
more we shall see that its one aim is to restore man, out of the Fall,
to the life in God for which he was created. It does this first, by
delivering him from the power of sin in Christ’s death, and then by
taking possession of his heart, his life, for God to work all in him
by the Holy Spirit. The whole argument of the Epistle to the Hebrews
as to the Old and New Covenants is here summed up in these concluding
verses. Just as He raised Christ from the dead, the God of the
everlasting Covenant can and will now make you perfect in every good
thing to do His will, working in you that which is well-pleasing in
His sight through Jesus Christ. Your doing His will is the object of
creation and redemption. God’s working it all in you is what
redemption has made possible. The Old Covenant of law and effort and
failure has ended in condemnation and death. The New Covenant is
coming to give, in all whom the law has slain and brought to bow in
their utter impotence, the law written in the heart, the Spirit
dwelling there, and God working all, both to will and to do, through
Jesus Christ.
Oh for a Divine revelation that the transition from Christ’s death, in
its impotence, to His life in God’s power, is the image, the pledge,
the power of our transition out of the Old Covenant, when it has slain
us, to the New, with God working in us all in all!
The transition from Old to New, as efected in Christ, was sudden. Is
it so in the believer? Not always. In us it depends upon a revelation.
There have been cases in which a believer, sighing and struggling
against the yoke of bondage, has in one moment had it given to him to
see what a complete salvation the New Covenant brings to the heart and
the inner life, through the ministration of the Spirit, and by faith
he has entered at once into his rest. There have been other cases in
which, gradual as the dawn of day, the light of God has risen upon the
heart. God’s offer of entrance into the enjoyment of our New Covenant
privileges is always urgent and immediate. Every believer is a child
of the New Covenant, and heir of all its promises. The death of the
Testator gives him full right to immediate possession. God longs to
bring us into the land of promise; let us not come short through
unbelief.
There may be someone who can hardly believe that such a mighty change
in his life is within his reach, and yet who would fain know what he
is to do if there is to be any hope of his attaining it. I have just
said, the death of the testator gives the heir immediate right to the
inheritance. And yet the heir, if he be a minor, does not enter on the
possession. A term of years ends the stage of minority on earth, and
he is no longer under guardians. In the spiritual life the state of
pupilage ends, not with the expiry of years, but the moment the minor
proves his fitness for being made free from the law, by accepting the
liberty there is in Christ Jesus. The transition, as with the Old
Testament, as with Christ, as with the disciples, comes when the time
is fulfilled and all things are now ready.
But what is one to do who is longing to be thus made ready? Accept
your death to sin in Christ, and act it out. Acknowledge the sentence
of death on everything that is of nature: take and keep the place
before God of utter unworthiness and helplessness; sink down before
Him in humility, meekness, patience, and resignation to His will and
mercy. [5] Fix your heart upon the great and mighty God, who in His
grace will work in you above what you can ask or think, and will make
you a monument of His mercy. Believe that every blessing of the
Covenant of grace is yours; by the death of the Testator you are
entitled to it all–and on that faith act, knowing that all is yours.
The new heart is yours, the law written in the heart is yours, the
Holy Spirit, the seal of the Covenant, is yours. Act on thie faith,
and count upon God as Faithful and Able, and oh! so Loving, to reveal
in you, to make true in you, all the power and glory of His
everlasting Covenant.
May God reveal to us the difference between the two lives under the
Old and the New; the resurrection power of the New, with God working
all in us; the power of the transition secured to us in death with
Christ and life in Him. And may He teach us at once to trust Christ
Jesus for a full participation in all the New Covenant secures.
_________________________________________________________________
[4] The Greek word for covenant and testament is the same. This is the
only passage where the allusion to a testator, makes the meaning
testament a necessity. Everywhere else the Revised Version has rightly
used covenant.
[5] If you would understand the full meaning of this clause and know
how to practise its teaching, consult a little book just published,
Dying to Self: A Golden Dialogue, by William Law, with Notes by Rev.
Andrew Murray. (Nisbet & Co.) See also Note D.
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THE TWO COVENANTS
CHAPTER IX
The Blood of the Covenant
“Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made with
you.”–EX. xxiv. 8; HEB. ix. 20.
“This cup is the new covenant in My blood.”–1 COR. xi. 25; MATT.
xxvi. 28.
“The blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified.”–HEB. x. 29.
“The blood of the everlasting covenant.”–HEB. xiii.21.
THE blood is one of the strangest, the deepest, the mightiest, and the
most heavenly of the thoughts of God. It lies at the very root of both
Covenants, but specially of the New Covenant. The difference between
the two Covenants is the difference between the blood of beasts, and
the blood of the Lamb of God! The power of the New Covenant has no
lesser measure than the worth of the blood of the Son of God! Your
Christian experience ought to know of no standard of peace with God,
and purity from sin, and power over the world, than the blood of
Christ can give! If we would enter truly and fully into all the New
Covenant is meant to be to us, let us beseech God to reveal to us the
worth and the power of the blood of the Covenant, the precious blood
of Christ!
The First Covenant was not brought in without blood. There could be no
Covenant of friendship between a holy God and sinful men without
atonement and reconciliation; and no atonement without a death as the
penalty of sin. God shake: “I have given you the blood upon the altar
to make an atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that maketh
an atonement for the soul.” The blood shed in death meant the death of
a sacrifice slain for sin of man; the blood sprinkled on the altar
meant that vicarious death accepted of God for the sinful one. No
forgiveness, no covenant without blood-shedding.
All this was but type and shadow of what was one day to become a
mysterious reality. What no thought of man or angel could have
conceived, what even now passeth all understanding, the Eternal Son of
God took flesh and blood, and then shed that blood as the blood of the
New Covenant, not merely to ratify it, but to open the way for it and
to make it possible. Yea, more, to be, in time and eternity, the
living power by which entrance into the Covenant was to be obtained,
and all life in it be secured. Until we learn to form our expectation
of a life in the New Covenant, according to the inconceivable worth
and power of the blood of God’s Son, we never can have even an insight
into the entirely supernatural and heavenly life that a child of God
may live. Let us think for a moment on the threefold light in which
Scripture teaches us to regard it.
In the passage from Hebrews ix. 15 we read “For this cause Christ is
the Mediator of a new covenant, that a death having taken place for
the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first
covenant, they that have been called may receive the promise of the
eternal inheritance.” The sins of the ages, of the First Covenant,
which had only figuratively been atoned for, had gathered up before
God. A death was needed for the redemption of these: In that death and
blood-shedding of the Lamb of God not only were these atoned for, but
the power of all sin was for ever broken.
The blood of the New Covenant is redemption blood, a purchase price
and ransom from the power of Sin and the Law. In any purchase made on
earth the transference of property from the old owner to the new is
complete. Its worth may be ever so great and the hold on it ever so
strong, if the price be paid, it is gone for ever from him who owned
it. The hold sin had on us was terrible. No thought can realise its
legitimate claim on us under God’s law, its awful tyrant power in
enslaving us. But the blood of God’s Son has been paid. “Ye were
redeemed, not with corruptible things as silver and gold, from your
vain manner of life handed down from your fathers, but with precious
blood, as of a lamb without spot, even the blood of Christ.” We have
been rescued, ransomed, redeemed out of our old natural life under the
power of sin, utterly and eternally. Sin has not the slightest claim
on us, nor the slightest power over us, except as our ignorance or
unbelief or half-heartedness allows it to have dominion. Our New
Covenant birthright is to stand in the freedom with which Christ has
made us free. Until the soul sees, and desires and accepts, and claims
the redemption and the liberty which has the blood of the Son of God
for its purchase price, and its measure, and its security, it never
can fully live the New Covenant life.
As wonderful as the blood-shedding for our redemption is the
blood-sprinkling for our cleansing. Here is indeed another of the
spiritual mysteries of the New Covenant, which lose their power when
understood in human wisdom, without the ministration of the Spirit of
life. When Scripture speaks of “having our hearts sprinkled from an
evil conscience,” of “the blood of Christ cleansing our conscience,”
of our singing here on earth (Rev. i. 5), “To Him that washed us from
our sins in His blood,” it brings this mighty, quickening blood of the
Lamb into direct contact with our hearts. It gives the assurance that
that blood, in its infinite worth, in its Divine sin-cleansing power,
can keep us clean in our walk in the sight and the light of God. It is
as this blood of the New Covenant is known, and trusted, and waited
for, and received from God, in the Spirit’s mighty operation in the
heart, that we shall begin to believe that the blessed promise of a
New Covenant life and walk can be fulfilled.
There is one more thing Scripture teaches concerning this blood of the
New Covenant. When the Jews contrasted Moses with our Lord Jesus, He
spake: “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His
blood, ye have not life in yourselves. He that eateth My flesh, and
drinketh My blood, abideth in Me, and I in him.” As if the redeeming,
and sprinkling, and washing, and sanctifying does not sufficiently
express the intense inwardness of its action and its power to permeate
our whole being, the drinking of this precious blood is declared to be
indispensable to having life. If we would enter deep into the Spirit
and power of the New Covenant, let us, by the Holy Spirit, drink deep
of this cup–the cup of the New Covenant in His blood.
On account of sin there could be no covenant between man and God
without blood. And no New Covenant without the blood of the Son of
God. As the cleansing away of sins was the first condition in making a
covenant, so it is equally the first condition of an entrance into it.
It has ever been found that a deeper appropriation of the blessings of
the Covenant must be preceded by a new and deeper cleansing from sin.
We know how in Ezekiel the words about God’s causing us to walk in His
statutes are preceded by “From all your filthiness will I cleanse
you.” And then later we read (xxxvii. 23, 25), “Neither shall they
defile themselves any more with any of their transgressions; I will
cleanse them: so shall they be My people, and I will be their God.
Moreover, I will make a Covenant of peace with them; it shall be an
everlasting Covenant with them.” The confession and casting away, and
the cleansing away of sin in the blood, are the indispensable, but
all-sufficient, preparation for a life in everlasting Covenant with
God.
Many feel that they do not understand or realise this wonderful power
of the blood. Much thought does not help them; even prayer does not
appear to bring the light they seek. The blood of Christ is a Divine
mystery that passes all thought. Like every spiritual and heavenly
blessing, this too, but this especially, needs to be imparted to us by
the Holy Spirit. It was “through the Eternal Spirit” that Christ
offered the sacrifice in which the blood was shed. The blood had the
life of Christ, the life of the Spirit, in it. The outpouring of the
blood for us was to prepare the way for the outpouring of the Spirit
on us. It is the Holy Spirit, and He alone, who can minister the blood
of the everlasting Covenant in power. Just as He leads the soul to the
initial faith in the pardon that blood has purchased, and the peace it
gives, He leads further to the knowledge and experience of its
cleansing power. Here again, too, by faith–a faith in a heavenly
power, of which it does not fully understand, and cannot define, the
action, but of which it knows that it is an operation of God’s mighty
power, and effects a cleansing that does give a clean heart. A clean
heart, first known and accepted by the same faith, apart from signs or
feelings, apart from sense or reason, and then experienced in the joy
and the fellowship with God it brings. Oh! let us believe in the blood
of the everlasting Covenant, and the cleansing the Holy Spirit
ministers. Let us believe in the ministration of the Holy Spirit,
until our whole life in the New Covenant becomes entirely His work, to
the glory of the Father and of Christ.
The blood of the Covenant, O mystery of mysteries! O grace above all
grace! O mighty power of God, opening the way, into the holiest, and
into our hearts, and into the New Covenant, where the Holy One and our
heart meet! Let us ask God much, by His Holy Spirit, to make us know
what it is and works. The transition from the death of the Old
Covenant to the life of the New was, in Christ, “through the blood of
the Everlasting Covenant.” No otherwise will it be with us.
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THE TWO COVENANTS
CHAPTER X
Jesus, the Mediator of the New Covenant
“I give thee for a covenant of the people.”–ISA. xlii. 6, xlix. 8.
“The Lord shall suddenly come to His temple, even the Messenger of the
covenant, whom ye delight in.”–MAL. iii. 1.
“Jesus was made Surety of a better covenant.”–HEB. vii. 22.
“The Mediator of the Better Covenant, established upon better promises
. . . The Mediator of the New Covenant. . . Ye are come to Jesus, the
Mediator of the New Covenant.”–HEB. viii. 6, ix. 15, xii. 24.
WE have here four titles given to our Lord Jesus in connection with
the New Covenant. He is Himself called a Covenant. The union between
God and man, which the Covenant aims at, was wrought out in Him
personally; in Him the reconciliation between the human and Divine was
perfectly effected; in Him His people find the Covenant with all its
blessings; He is all that God has to give, and is the assurance that
it is given. . . He is called the Messenger of the Covenant, because
He came to establish and to proclaim it. . . He is the Surety of the
Covenant, not only because He paid our debt, but as He is Surety to us
for God, that God will fulfil His part; and Surety for us with God,
that we will fulfil our part. . . And He is Mediator of the Covenant,
because as the Covenant was established in His atoning blood, is
administered and applied by Him, is entered upon alone by faith in
Him, so it is experimentally known only through the power of His
resurrection life, and His never-ceasing intercession. All these names
point to the one truth, that in the New Covenant Christ is all in all.
The subject is so large that it would be impossible to enter upon all
the various aspects of this precious truth. Christ’s work in atonement
and intercession, in His bestowal of pardon and the Holy Spirit, in
His daily communication of grace and strength, are truths which lie at
the very foundation of the faith of Christians. We need not speak of
them here. What specially needs to be made clear to many is how, by
faith in Christ as the Mediator of the New Covenant, we actually have
access to and enter into the enjoyment of all its promised blessings.
We have already seen, in studying the New Covenant, how all these
blessings culminate in the one thing–that the heart of man is to be
put right, as the only possible way of his living in the favour of
God, and God’s love finding its satisfaction in him. That he is to
receive a heart to fear God, to love God with all his strength, to
obey God, and to keep all His statutes. All that Christ did and does
has this for its aim; all the higher blessings of peace and fellowship
flow from this. In this God’s saving power and love find the highest
proof of their triumph over sin. Nothing so reveals the grace of God,
the power of Jesus Christ, the reality of salvation, the blessedness
of the New Covenant, as the heart of a believer, where sin once
abounded, with grace now abounding more exceedingly within it.
I do not know how I can better set forth the glory of our Blessed Lord
Jesus as He accomplishes this, the real object of His redeeming work,
and as He takes entire possession of the heart He has bought and won
and cleansed as a dwelling for His Father, than by pointing out the
place He takes, and the work He does, in the case of a soul who is
being led out of the Old Covenant bondage with its failure, into the
real experience of the promise and power of the New Covenant. [6] In
thus studying the work of the Mediator in an individual, we may get a
truer conception of the real glory and greatness of the work He
actually accomplishes, than when we only think of the work He has done
for all. It is in the application of the redemption here in the life
of earth, where sin abounded, that its power is seen. Let us see how
the entrance into the New Covenant blessing is attained.
The first step towards it, in one who has been truly converted and
assured of his acceptance with God, is the sense of sin. He sees that
the New Covenant promises are not made true in his experience. There
is not only indwelling sin, but he finds that he gives way to temper,
and self-will, and worldliness, and other known transgressions of
God’s law. The obedience to which God calls and will fit him, the life
of abiding in Christ’s love which is his privilege, the power for a
holy walk, well-pleasing to God,–in all this his conscience condemns
him. It is in this conviction of sin that any thought or desire of the
full New Covenant blessing must have its rise. Where the thought that
obedience is an impossibility, and that nothing but a life of failure
and self-condemnation is to be looked for, has wrought a secret
despair of deliverance, or contentment with our present state, it is
vain to speak of God’s promise or power. The heart does not respond:
it knows well enough, it is sure, the liberty spoken of is a dream.
But where the dissatisfaction with our state has wrought a longing for
something better, the heart is open to receive the message.
The New Covenant is meant to be the deliverance from the power of sin;
a keen longing for this is the indispensable preparation for entering
fully into the Covenant.
Now comes the second step. As the mind is directed to the literal
meaning of the terms of the New Covenant, in its promises of cleansing
from sin, and a heart filled with God’s fear and God’s law, and a
power to keep God’s commands and never to depart from Him; as the eye
is fixed on Jesus the Surety of the Covenant, who will Himself make it
all true; and as the voice is heard of witnesses who can declare how,
after years of bondage, all this has been fulfilled in them–the
longing begins to grow into a hope, and the inquiry is made, as to
what is needed to enter this blessed life.
Then follows another step. The heart-searching question comes whether
we are willing to give up every evil habit, all our own self-will, all
that is of the spirit of the world, and surrender ourselves to be
wholly and exclusively for Jesus. God cannot take so complete
possession of a man, and bless him so wonderfully, and work in him so
mightily, unless He has him very completely, yea, wholly for Himself.
Happy the man who is ready for any sacrifice.
Now comes the last, the simplest, and yet often the most difficult
step. And here it is we need to know Jesus as Mediator of the
Covenant. As we hear of the life of holiness, and obedience, and
victory over sin, which the Covenant promises, and hear that it will
be to us according to our faith, so that if we claim it in faith it
will surely be ours, the heart often fails for fear. I am willing, but
have I the power to make, and what is more, to maintain this full
surrender? Have I the power, the strong faith, so to grasp and hold
this offered blessing, that it shall indeed be and continue mine? How
such questions perplex the soul until it finds the answer to them in
the one word: Jesus! It is He who will bestow the power to make the
surrender and to believe. This is as surely and as exclusively His
work, as atonement and intercession are His alone. As sure as it was
His to win and ascend the throne, it is His to prove His dominion in
the individual soul. It is He, the Living One, who is in Divine power
to work and maintain the life of communion and victory within us. He
is the Mediator and Surety of the Covenant–He, the God-man, who has
undertaken not only for all that God requires, but for all that we
need too.
When this is seen, the believer learns that here, just as at
conversion, it is all of faith. The one thing needed now is, with the
eye definitely fixed on some promise of the New Covenant, to turn from
self and anything it could or need do, to let go self, and fall into
the arms of Jesus. He is the Mediator of the New Covenant: it is His
to lead us into it. In the assurance that Jesus, and every New
Covenant blessing, is already ours in virtue of our being God’s
children; with the desire now to appropriate and enjoy what we have
hitherto allowed to lie unused; in the faith that Jesus now gives us
the needed strength in faith to claim and accept our heritage as a
present possession; the will dares boldly to do the deed, and to take
the heavenly gift–a life in Christ according to the better promises.
By faith in Jesus you have seen and received Him as to you, in full
truth, the Mediator of the New Covenant, both in heaven arid in your
heart. He is the Mediator who makes it true between God and you, as
your experience.
The fear has sometimes been expressed that, if we press so urgently
the work that Christ through the Spirit does in the heart, we may be
drawn off from trusting in what He has done and ever is doing, to what
we are experiencing of its working. The answer is simple. It is with
the heart alone that Christ can be truly known or honoured. It is in
the heart the work of grace is to be done, and the saving power of
Christ to be displayed. It is in the heart alone the Holy Spirit has
His sphere of work; there He is to work Christ’s likeness; it is there
alone He can glorify Christ. The Spirit can only glorify Christ by
revealing His saving power in us. If we were to speak of what we are
to do in cleansing our heart and keeping it right, the fear would be
well-grounded. But the New Covenant calls us to the very opposite.
What it tells us of the Atonement, and the Righteousness of God it has
won for us, will be our only glory even amid the highest holiness of
heaven: Christ’s work of holiness here in the heart can only deepen
the consciousness of that Righteousness as our only plea. The
sanctification of the Spirit, as the fulfilment of the New Covenant
promises, is all a taking of the things of Christ and revealing and
imparting them to us. The deeper our entrance into and our possession
of the New Covenant gift of a new heart, the fuller will be our
knowledge and our love of Him who is its Mediator; the more we shall
glory in Him alone. The Covenant deals with the heart, just that
Christ may be found there, may dwell there by faith. As we look at the
heart, not in the light of feeling or experience, but in the light of
the faith of God’s Covenant, we shall learn to think and speak of it
as God does, and begin to know what it is, that there Christ manifests
Himself and there He and the Fatlier come to make their abode.
_________________________________________________________________
[6] For a practical illustration in the life of Canon Battersby, see
Note D.
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THE TWO COVENANTS
CHAPTER XI
Jesus, the Surety of a Better Covenant
“And inasmuch as it is not without the taking of an oath: by so much
also hath Jesus become the Surety of a better covenant. Wherefore also
He is able to save completely them that draw near unto God through
Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them.”-HEB. vii.
20, 22, 25.
A SURETY is one who stands good for another, that a certain engagement
will be faithfully performed. Jesus is the Surety of the New Covenant.
He stands surety with us for God–, that God’s part in the Covenant
will faithfully be performed. And He stands surety with God for us,
that our part will be faithfully performed too. If we are to live in
covenant with God, everything depends upon our knowing aright what
Jesus secures to us. The more we know and trust Him, the more assured
will our faith be that its every promise and every demand will be
fulfilled, that a life of faithful keeping of God’s Covenant is indeed
possible, because Jesus is the Surety of the Covenant. He makes God’s
faithfulness and ours equally sure.
We read that it was because His priesthood was confirmed by the oath
of God, that He became the Surety of a so much better Covenant. The
oath of God gives us the security that His suretyship will secure all
the better promises. The meaning and infinite value of God’s oath had
been explained in the previous chapter. “In every dispute the oath is
final for confirmation. Wherein God, being minded to show more
abundantly unto the heirs of the promise the immutability of His
counsel, interposed with an oath, that by two immutable things, in
which it is impossible for God to lie, we may have a strong
encouragement.” We thus have not only a Covenant, with certain
definite promises; we have not only Jesus, the Surety of the Covenant;
but at the back of that again, we have the living God, with a view to
our having perfect confidence in the unchangeableness of His counsel
and promise, coming in between with an oath. Do we not begin to see
that the one thing God aims at in this Covenant, and asks with regard
to it, is an absolute confidence that He is going to do all He has
promised, however difficult or wonderful it may appear? His oath is an
end of all fear or doubt. Let no one think of understanding the
Covenant, of judging or saying what may be expected from it, much less
of experiencing its blessings, until he meets God with an Abrahamlike
faith, that gives Him the glory, and is fully assured that what He has
promised He is able to perform. The Covenant is a sealed mystery,
except to the soul who is going without reserve to trust God, and
abandon itself to His word and work.
Of the work of Christ, as the Surety of the better Covenant, our
passage tells us that, because of this priesthood confirmed by oath,
He is able to save completely those who draw near to God through Him.
And this, because “He ever liveth to make intercession for them.” As
Surety of the Covenant, He is ceaselessly engaged in watching their
needs, and presenting them to the Father, in receiving His answer, and
imparting its blessing. It is because of this never-ceasing mediation,
receiving and transmitting from God to us the gifts and powers of the
heavenly world, that He is able to save completely–to work and
maintain in us a salvation as complete as God is willing it should be,
as complete as the Better Covenant has assured us it shall be, in the
better promises upon which it was established. These promises are
expounded (ch. viii. 7-13) as being none other than those of the New
Covenant of Jeremiah, with the law written in the heart by the Spirit
of God as our experience of the power of that salvation.
Jesus, the Surety of a better Covenant, Jesus is to be our assurance
that everything connected with the Covenant is unchangeably and
eternally sure. In Jesus the keynote is given of all our intercourse
with God, of all our prayers and desires, of all our life and walk,
that with full assurance of faith and hope we may look for every word
of the Covenant to be made fully true to us by God’s own power. Let us
look at some of these things of which we are to be fully assured, if
we are to breathe the spirit of children of the New Covenant. There is
the love of God. The very thought of a Covenant is an alliance of
friendship. And it is as a means of assuring us of His love, of
drawing us close to His heart of love, of getting our hearts under the
power of His love, and filled with it–it is because God loves us with
an infinite love, and wants us to know it, and to give it complete
liberty to bestow itself on us, and bless us, that the New Covenant
has been made, and God’s own Son been made its Surety. This love of
God is an infinite Divine energy, doing its utmost to fill the soul
with itself and its blessedness. Of this love God’s Son is the
Messenger; of the Covenant in which God reveals it to us He is the
Surety; let us learn that the chief need in studying the Covenant and
keeping it, in seeking and claiming its blessings, is the exercise of
a strong and confident assurance in God’s love.
Then there is the assurance of the sufficiency of Christ’s finished
redemption. All that was needed to put away sin, to free us entirely
and for ever from its power, has been accomplished by Christ. His
blood and death, His resurrection and ascension, have taken us out of
the power of the world and transplanted us into a new life in the
power of the heavenly world. All this is Divine reality; Christ is
Surety that the Divine righteousness, and the Divine acceptance, that
all-sufficient Divine grace and strength, are ever ours. He is Surety
that all these can and will be communicated to us in unbroken
continuance.
It is even so with the assurance of what is needed on our part to
enter into this life in the New Covenant. We shrink back, either from
the surrender of all, because we know not whether we have the power to
let it go, or from the faith for all, because we fear ours will never
be so strong or so bold as to take all that is offered us in this
wonderful Covenant. Jesus is Surety of a better Covenant. The better
consists just in this very thing, that it undertakes to provide the
children of the Covenant with the very dispositions they need, to
accept and enjoy it. We have seen how the heart is just the central
object of the Covenant promise. A heart circumcised to love God with
all the heart, a heart into which God’s law and fear have been put, so
that it will not depart from Him–it is of all this Jesus is the
Surety under the oath of God. Let us say it once more: Surely the one
thing God asks of us, and has given the Covenant and its Surety to
secure–the confident trust that all will be done in us that is
needed—is what we dare not withhold.
I think some of us are beginning to see what has been our great
mistake. We have thought and spoken great things of what Christ did on
the Cross, and does on the Throne, as Covenant Surety. And we have
stopped there. But we have not expected Him to do great things in our
hearts. And yet it is there, in our heart, that the consummation takes
place of the work on the Cross and the Throne; in the heart the New
Covenant has its full triumph; the Surety is to be known not by what
the mind can think of Him in heaven, but by what he does to make
Himself known in the heart. There is the place where His love triumphs
and is enthroned. Let us with the heart believe and receive Him as the
Covenant Surety. Let us, with every desire we entertain in connection
with it, with every duty it calls us to, with every promise it holds
out, look to Jesus, under God’s oath the Surety of the Covenant. Let
us believe that by the Holy Spirit the heart is His home and His
throne. Let us, if we have not done it yet, in a definite act of
faith, throw ourselves utterly on Him, for the whole of the New
Covenant life and walk. No surety was ever so faithful to his
undertaking as Jesus will be to His on our behalf, in our hearts.
And now, notwithstanding the strong confidence and consolation the
oath of God and the Surety of the Covenant gives, there are some still
looking wistfully at this blessed life, and yet afraid to trust
themselves to this wondrous grace. They have a conception of faith as
something great and mighty, and they know and feel that theirs is not
such. And so their feebleness remains an insuperable barrier to their
inheriting the promise. Let me try and say once again: Brother, the
act of faith, by which you accept and enter this life in the New
Covenant, is not commonly an act of power, but often of weakness and
fear and much trembling. And even in the midst of all this feebleness,
it is not an act in your strength, but in a secret and perhaps unfelt
strength, which Jesus the Surety of the Covenant gives you. God has
made Him Surety, with the very object of inspiring us with courage and
confidence. He longs, He delights to bring you into the Covenant. Why
not bow before Him, and say meekly: He does hear prayer; He brings
into the Covenant; He enables a soul to believe; I may trust Him
confidently. And just begin quietly to believe that there is an
Almighty Lord, given by the Father, to do everything needed to make
all Covenant grace wholly true in you. Bow low, and look up out of
your low estate to your glorified Lord, and maintain your confidence
that a soul, that in its nothingness trusts in Him, will receive more
than it can ask or think.
Dear believer, come and be a believer. Believe that God is showing you
how entirely the Lord Jesus wants to have you and your life for
Himself; how entirely He is willing to take charge of you and work all
in you; how entirely you may even now commit your trust, and your
surrender, and your faithfulness to the Covenant, with all you are and
are to be, to Him, your Blessed Surety. If thou believest, thou shalt
see the glory of God. What Christ has undertaken, you may confidently
count upon His performing.
In a sense, and measure, and power that passeth knowledge, Jesus
Christ is Himself all that God can either ask or give, all that God
wants to see in us. “He that believeth in me, out of him shall flow
rivers of living water.”
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THE TWO COVENANTS
CHAPTER XII
The Book of the Covenant
“And Moses took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of
the people: and they said, All that the Lord hath said will we do and
be obedient. And Moses took the blood, and sprinkled it on the people,
and said, Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made
with you concerning all these words.”-EX. xxiv. 7, 8; comp. HEB. ix.
18-20.
HERE is a new aspect in which to regard God’s blessed Book. Before
Moses sprinkled the blood, he read the Book of the Covenant, and
obtained the people’s acceptance of it. And when he had sprinkled it,
he said, “Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made
concerning all these words.” The Book contained all the conditions of
the Covenant; only through the Book could they know all that God asked
of them, and all that they might ask of Him. Let us consider what new
light may be thrown both upon the Covenant and upon the Book, by the
one thought, that the Bible is the Book of the Covenant.
The very first thought suggested will be this, that in nothing will
the spirit of our life and experience, as it lives either in the Old
or the New Covenant, be more manifest than in our dealings with the
Book. The Old had a book as well as the New. Our Bible contains both.
The New was enfolded in the Old; the Old is unfolded in the New. It is
possible to read the Old in the spirit of the New; it is possible to
read the New as well as the Old in the spirit of the Old.
What this spirit of the Old is, we cannot see so clearly anywhere as
just in Israel when the Covenant was made. They were at once ready to
promise: “All that the Lord hath said will we do and be obedient.”
There was so little sense of their own sinfulness, or of the holiness
and glory of God, that with perfect self-confidence they considered
themselves able to undertake to keep the Covenant. They understood
little of the meaning of that blood with which they were sprinkled, or
of that death and redemption of which it was the symbol. In their own
strength, in the power of the flesh, they were ready to engage to
serve God. It is just the spirit in which many Christians regard the
Bible; as a system of laws, a course of instruction to direct us in
the way God would have us go. All He asks of us is, that we should do
our utmost in seeking to fulfil them; more we cannot do; this we are
sincerely ready to do. They know little or nothing of what the death
means through which the Covenant is established, or what the life from
the dead is through which alone a man can walk in covenant with the
God of heaven.
This self-confident spirit in Israel is explained by what had happened
just previously. When God had come down on Mount Sinai in thunderings
and lightnings to give the law, they were greatly afraid. They said to
Moses: “Let not God speak with us, lest we die; speak thou with us,
and we will hear.” They thought it was simply a matter of hearing and
knowing; they could for certain obey. They knew not that it is only
the presence, and the fear, and the nearness, and the power of God
humbling us and making us afraid, that can conquer the power of sin
and give the power to obey. It is so much easier to receive the
instruction from man, and live, than to wait and hear the voice of God
and die to all our own strength and goodness. It is no otherwise that
many Christians seek to serve God without ever seeking to live in
daily contact with Him, and without the faith that it is only His
presence can keep from sin. Their religion is a matter of outward
instruction from man: the waiting to hear God’s voice that they may
obey Him, the death to the flesh and the world that comes with a close
walk with God, are unknown. They may be faithful and diligent in the
study of their Bible, in reading or hearing Bible teaching; to have as
much as possible of that intercourse with the Covenant God Himself
which makes the Christian life possible–this they do not seek.
If you would be delivered from all this, learn ever to read the Book
of the New Covenant in the New Covenant Spirit. One of the very first
articles of the New Covenant has reference to this matter. When God
says, I will put My law in their inward parts, and write it in their
hearts, He engages that the words of His Holy Book shall no longer be
mere outward teaching, but that what they command shall be our very
disposition and delight, wrought in us as a birth and a life by the
Holy Spirit. Every word of the New Covenant then becomes a Divine
assurance of what may be obtained by the Holy Spirit’s working. The
soul learns to see that the letter killeth, that the flesh profiteth
nothing. The study, and knowledge of, the delight in, Bible words and
thoughts, cannot profit, except as the Holy Spirit is waited on to
make them life. The acceptance of Holy Scripture in the letter, the
reception of it in the human understanding, is seen to be as fruitless
as was Israel’s at Sinai. But as the Word of God, spoken by the Living
God through the Spirit into the heart that waits on Him, it is found
to be quick and powerful. It then is a word that worketh effectually
in them that believe, giving within the heart the actual possession of
the very grace of which the Word has spoken.
The New Covenant is a ministration of the Spirit (see Chap. VII). All
its teaching is meant to be teaching by the Holy Spirit. The two most
remarkable chapters in the Bible on the preaching of the gospel are
those in which Paul expounds the secret of this teaching (1 Cor. ii.;
2 Cor. iii.). Every minister ought to see whether he can pass his
examination in them. They tell us that in the New Covenant the Holy
Spirit is everything. It is the Holy Spirit entering the heart,
writing, revealing, impressing upon it God’s law and truth, that alone
works true obedience. No excellency of speech or human wisdom can in
the least profit: God must reveal by His Holy Spirit to preacher and
hearer the things He hath prepared for us. What is true of the
preacher is equally true of the hearer. One of the great reasons that
so many Christians never come out of the Old Covenant, never even know
that they are in it, and have to come out of it, is that there is so
much head knowledge, without the power of the Spirit in the heart
being waited for. It is only when preachers and hearers and readers
believe that the Book of the New Covenant needs the Spirit of the New
Covenant, to explain and apply it, that the Word of God can do its
work.
Learn the double lesson. What God hath joined together, let no man put
asunder. The Bible is the Book of the New Covenant. And the Holy
Spirit is the only minister of what belongs to the Covenant. Expect
not to understand or profit by thy Bible knowledge without seeking
continually the teaching of the Holy Spirit. Beware lest thy earnest
Bible study, thy excellent books, or thy beloved teachers take the
place of the Holy Spirit! Pray daily, and perseveringly, and
believingly for His teaching. He will write the Word in thy heart.
The Bible is the Book of the New Covenant. Ask the Holy Spirit
specially to reveal to thee the New Covenant in it. It is
inconceivable what loss the Church of our day is suffering because so
few believers truly live as its heirs, in the true knowledge and
enjoyment of its promises. Ask God, in humble faith, to give thee in
all thy Bible reading, the spirit of wisdom and revelation,
enlightened eyes of thine heart, to know what the promises are which
the Covenant reveals; and what the Divine security in Jesus, the
Surety of the Covenant, that every promise will be fulfilled in thee
in Divine power; and what the intimate fellowship to which it admits
thee with the God of the Covenant. The ministration of the Spirit,
humbly waited for and listened to, will make the Book of the Covenant
shine with new light–even the light of God’s countenance and a full
salvation.
All this applies specially to the knowledge of what actually the New
Covenant is meant to work. Amid all we hear, and read, and understand
of the different promises of the New Covenant, it is quite possible
that we never yet have had that heavenly vision of it as a whole, that
with its overmastering power compels acceptance. Just hear once again
what it really is. True obedience, and fellowship with God, for which
man was created, which sin broke off, which the law demanded, but
could not work, which God’s own Son came from heaven to restore in our
lives, is now brought within our reach and offered us. Our Father
tells us in the Book of the New Covenant that He now expects us to
live in full and unbroken obedience and communion with Him. He tells
us that by the mighty power of His Son and Spirit He Himself will work
this in us: everything has been arranged for it. He tells us that such
a life of unbroken obedience is possible because Christ, as the
Mediator, will live in us and enable us each moment to live in Him. He
tells us that all He wants is simply the surrender of faith, the
yielding ourselves to Him to do His work. Oh! let us look, and see
this holy life, with all its powers and blessings, coming down from
God in heaven, in the Son and His Spirit. Let us believe that the Holy
Spirit can give us a vision of it, as a prepared Gift, to be bestowed
in living power, and take possession of us. Let us look upward and
look inward, in the faith of the Son and the Spirit, and God will show
us that every word written in the Book of the Covenant is not only
true, but that it can be made spirit and truth within us, and in our
daily life. This can indeed be.
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THE TWO COVENANTS
CHAPTER XIII
New Covenant Obedience
“Now therefore, if ye will obey My voice indeed, and keep My covenant,
then ye shall be a holy nation unto Me.”-EX. xix. 5.
“And the Lord Thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of
thy seed, to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all
thy soul. And thou shalt obey the voice of the Lord, and do all His
commandments.”–DEUT.xxx. 6, 8.
“And I will put My Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My
statutes, and ye shall keep My judgments.”–EZEK.xxxvi. 27.
IN making the New Covenant, God said very definitely, “Not after the
covenant I made with your fathers.” We have learnt what the fault was
with that Covenant: it made God’s favour dependent upon the obedience
of the people. “If ye obey, I will be your God.” We have learnt how
the New Covenant remedied the defect: God Himself provided for the
obedience. It changes “If ye keep My judgments” into “I will put My
Spirit within you, and ye shall keep.” Instead of the Covenant and its
fulfilment depending on man’s obedience, God undertakes to ensure the
obedience. The Old Covenant proved the need, and pointed out the path,
of holiness: the New inspires the love, and gives the power, of
holiness.
In connection with this change, a serious and most dangerous mistake
is often made. Because in the New Covenant obedience no longer
occupies the place it had in the Old, as the condition of the
Covenant, and free grace has taken its place, justifying the ungodly,
and bestowing gifts on the rebellious, many are under the impression
that obedience is now no longer as indispensable as it was then. The
error is a terrible one. The whole Old Covenant was meant to teach the
lesson of the absolute and indispensable necessity of obedience for a
life in God’s favour. The New Covenant comes, not to provide a
substitute for that obedience in faith, but through faith to secure
the obedience, by giving a heart that delights in it and has the power
for it. And men abuse the free grace, that without our own obedience
accepts us for a life of new obedience, when they rest content with
the grace, without the obedience it is meant for. They boast of the
higher privileges of the New Covenant, while its chief blessing, the
power of a holy life, a heart delighting in God’s law, and a life in
which God causes and enables us, by his indwelling Spirit, to keep His
commandments, is neglected. If there is one thing we need to know
well, it is the place obedience takes in the New Covenant.
Let our first thought be: Obedience is essential. At the very root of
the relation of a creature to his God, and of God admitting the
creature to His fellowship, lies the thought of obedience. It is the
one only thing God spoke of in Paradise when “the Lord God commanded
the man” not to eat of the forbidden fruit. In Christ’s great
salvation it is the power that redeemed us: “By the obedience of one
shall many be made righteous.” In the promise of the New Covenant it
takes the first place. God engages to circumcise the hearts of His
people–in the putting off of the body of the flesh, in the
circumcision of Christ–to love God with all their heart, and to obey
His commandments. The crowning gift of Christ’s exaltation was the
Holy Ghost, to bring salvation to us as an inward thing. The first
Covenant demanded obedience, and failed because it could not find it.
The New Covenant was expressly made to provide for obedience. To a
life in the full experience of the New Covenant blessing, obedience is
essential.
It is this indispensable necessity of obedience that explains why so
often the entrance into the full enjoyment of the New Covenant has
depended upon some single act of surrender. There was something in the
life, some evil or doubtful habit, in regard to which conscience had
often said that it was not in perfect accord with God’s perfect will.
Attempts were made to push aside the troublesome suggestion. Or
unbelief said it would be impossible to overcome the habit, and
maintain the promise of obedience to the Voice within. Meantime, all
our prayer appeared of no avail. It was as if faith could not lay hold
of the blessing which was full in sight, until at last the soul
consented to regard this little thing as the test of its surrender to
obey in everything, and of its faith that in everything the Surety of
the Covenant would give power to maintain the obedience. With the evil
or doubtful thing given up, with a good conscience restored, and the
heart’s confidence before God assured, the soul could receive and
possess what it sought. Obedience is essential.
Obedience is possible. The thought of a demand which man cannot
possibly render, cuts at the very root of true hope and strength. The
secret thought, ” No man can obey God,” throws thousands back into the
Old Covenant life, and into a false peace that God does not expect
more than that we do our best. Obedience is possible: the whole New
Covenant promises and secures this.
Only understand aright what obedience means. The renewed man has still
the flesh, with its evil nature, out of which there arise involuntary
evil thoughts and dispositions. These may be found in a truly obedient
man. Obedience deals with the doing of what is known to be God’s will,
as taught by the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and conscience. When
George Muller spoke of the great happiness he had had for more than
sixty years in God’s service, he attributed it two things–He had
loved God’s Word, and “he had maintained a good conscience, not
wilfully going on in a course he knew to be contrary to the mind of
God.” When the full light of God broke in upon Gerhard Tersteegen, he
wrote: “I promise, with Thy help and power, rather to give up the last
drop of my blood, than knowingly and willingly in my heart or my life
be untrue and disobedient to Thee.” Such obedience is an attainable
degree of grace.
Obedience is possible. When the law is written in the heart; when the
heart is circumcised to love the Lord with all our heart, and to obey
Him; when the love of God is shed abroad in the heart; it means that
the love of God’s law and of Himself has now become the moving power
of our life. This love is no vague sentiment, in man’s imagination of
something that exists in heaven, but a living, mighty power of God in
the heart, working effectually according to His working, which worketh
in us mightily. A life of obedience is possible.
This obedience is of faith. “By faith, Abraham obeyed.” By faith the
promises of the Covenant, the presence of the Surety of the Covenant,
the hidden inworking of the Holy Spirit, and the love of God in His
infinite desire and power to make true in us all His love and
promises, must live in us. Faith can bring them nigh, and make us live
in the very midst of them. Christ and His wonderful redemption need
not remain at a distance from us in heaven, but can become our
continual experience. However cold or feeble we may feel, faith knows
that the new heart is in us, that the love of God’s law is our very
nature, that the teaching and power of the Spirit are within us. Such
faith knows it can obey. Let us hear the voice of our Saviour, the
Surety of the Covenant, as He says, with a deeper, fuller meaning than
when He was on earth: “Only believe. If thou canst believe, all things
are possible to him that believeth.”
And last of all, let us understand: Obedience is blessedness. Do not
regard it only as the way to the joy and blessings of the New
Covenant, but as itself, in its very nature, joy and happiness. To
have the voice of God teaching and guiding you, to be united to God in
willing what He wills, in working out what He works in you by His
Spirit, in doing His Holy Will, and pleasing Him,–surely all this is
joy unspeakable and full of glory.
To a healthy man it is a delight to walk or work, to put forth his
strength and conquer difficulties. To a slave or a hireling it is
bondage and weariness. The Old Covenant demanded obedience with an
inexorable must, and the threat that followed it. The New Covenant
changes the must to can and may. Do ask God, by the Holy Spirit, to
show you how “you have been created in Christ Jesus unto good works,
“and how, as fitted as a vine is for bearing grapes, your new nature
is perfectly prepared for every good work. Ask Him to show you that He
means obedience, not only to be a possible thing, but the most
delightful and attractive gift He has to bestow, the entrance into His
love and all its blessedness.
In the New Covenant the chief thing is not the wonderful treasure of
strength and grace it contains, nor the Divine security that that
treasure never can fail, but this, that the living God gives Himself,
and makes Himself known, and takes possession of us as our God. For
this man was created, for this He was redeemed again, for this, that
it maybe our actual experience, the Holy Spirit has been given and is
dwelling in us. Between what God has already wrougbt in us, and what
He waits to work, obedience is the blessed link. Let us seek to walk
before Him in the confidence that we are of those who live in the
noble and holy consciousness: my one work is to obey God. [7] What can
be the reason, I ask once again, that so many believers have seen so
little of the beauty of this New Covenant life, with its power of holy
and joyful obedience? “Their eyes were holden that they knew Him not.”
The Lord was with the disciples, but their hearts were blind. It is so
still. It is as with Elisha’s servant, all heaven is around him and he
knows it not. Nothing will help but the prayer, “Lord, open his eyes,
that he may see.” Lord, is there not someone who may be reading this,
who just needs one touch to see it all? Oh! give that touch!
Just listen, my brother. Thy Father loves thee with an infinite love,
and longs to make thee, even to-day, His holy, happy, obedient child.
Hear His message: He has for thee an entirely different life from what
thou art living. A life in which His grace shall actually work in thee
every moment all He asks thee to be. A life of simple childlike
obedience, doing for the day just what the Father shows thee to be His
will. A life in which the abiding love of thy Father, and the abiding
presence of thy Saviour, and the joy of the Holy Spirit, can keep
thee, and make thee glad and strong. This is His message. This life is
for thee. Fear not to accept this life, to give up thyself to it and
its entire obedience. In Christ it is possible, it is sure.
Now, my brother, just turn heavenward and ask the Father, by the Holy
Spirit, to show thee the beautiful heavenly life. Ask and expect it.
Keep thine eyes fixed upon it. The great blessing of the New Covenant
is obedience; the wonderful power to will and do as God wills. It is
indeed the entrance to every other blessing. It is paradise restored
and heaven opened–the creature honouring his Creator, the Creator
delighting in His creature; the child glorifying the Father, the
Father glorifying the child, as He changes him, from glory to glory,
into the likeness of His Son.
_________________________________________________________________
[7] In a volume just published, The School of Obedience, the thoughts
of this chapter are more fully worked out.
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THE TWO COVENANTS
CHAPTER XIV
The New Covenant: a Covenant of Grace
“Sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law,
but under grace.”-ROM. vi. 14.
THE words, Covenant of grace, though not found in Scripture, are the
correct expression of the truth it abundantly teaches, that the
contrast between the two covenants is none other than that of law and
grace. Of the New Covenant, grace is the great characteristic: “The
law came in, that the offence might abound; but where sin abounded,
grace did abound more exceedingly.” It is to bring the Romans away
entirely from under the Old Covenant, and to teach them their place in
the New, that Paul writes: “Ye are not under the law, but under
grace.” And he assures them that if they believe this, and live in it,
their experience would confirm God’s promise: “Sin shall not have
dominion over you.” What the law could not do–give deliverance from
the power of sin over us–grace would effect. The New Covenant was
entirely a Covenant of grace. In the wonderful grace of God it had its
origin; it was meant to be a manifestation of the riches and the glory
of that grace; of grace, and by grace working in us, all its promises
can be fulfilled and experienced.
The word grace is used in two senses. It is first the gracious
disposition in God which moves Him to love us freely without our
merit, and to bestow all His blessings upon us. Then it also means
that power through which this grace does its work in us. The redeeming
work of Christ, and the righteousness He won for us; equally with the
work of the Spirit in us, as the power of the new life, are spoken of
as Grace. It includes all that Christ has done and still does, all He
has and gives, all He is for us and in us. John says, “We beheld His
glory, the glory of the Only Begotten of the Father, full of grace and
truth.” “The law was given by Moses grace and truth came by Jesus
Christ.” “And of His fulness have all we received, and grace for
grace.” What the law demands, grace supplies.
The contrast which John pointed out is expounded by Paul: “The law
came in, that the offence might abound,” and the way be prepared for
the abounding of grace more exceedingly. The law points the way, but
gives no strength to walk in it. The law demands, but makes no
provision for its demands being met. The law burdens and condemns and
slays. It can waken desire, but not satisfy it. It can rouse to
effort, but not secure success. It can appeal to motives, but gives no
inward power beyond what man himself has. And so, while warring
against sin, it became its very ally in giving the sinner over to a
hopeless condemnation. “The strength of sin is the law.”
To deliver us from the bondage and the dominion of sin, grace came by
Jesus Christ. Its work is twofold. Its exceeding abundance is seen in
the free and full pardon there is of all transgression, in the
bestowal of a perfect righteousness, and in the acceptance into God’s
favour and friendship. “In Him we have redemption through His blood,
the forgiveness of sin according to the riches of His grace.” It is
not only at conversion and our admittance into God’s favour, but
throughout all our life, at each step of our way, and amid the highest
attainments of the most advanced saint; we owe everything to grace,
and grace alone. The thought of merit and work and worthiness is for
ever excluded.
The exceeding abundance of grace is equally seen in the work which the
Holy Spirit every moment maintains within us. We have found that the
central blessing of the New Covenant, flowing from Christ’s redemption
and the pardon of our sins, is the new heart in which God’s law and
fear and love have been put. It is in the fulfilment of this promise,
in the maintenance of the heart in a state of meetness for God’s
indwelling, that the glory of grace is specially seen. In the very
nature of things this must be so. Paul writes: “Where sin abounded,
grace did more exceedingly abound.” And where, as far as I was
concerned, did sin abound? All the sin in earth and hell could not
harm me, were it not for its presence in my heart. It is there it has
exercised its terrible dominion. And it is there the exceeding
abundance of grace must be proved, if it is to benefit me. All grace
in earth and heaven could not help me; it is only in the heart it can
be received, and known, and enjoyed. “Where sin abounded,” in the
heart, there “grace did more exceedingly abound; that as sin reigned
in death,” working its destruction in the heart and life, “even so
might grace reign,” in the heart too, “through righteousness into
eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” As had been said just
before, “They that receive the abundance of grace shall reign in life
through Jesus Christ.”
Of this reign of grace in the heart Scripture speaks wondrous things.
Paul speaks of the grace that fitted him for his work, of “the gift of
that grace of God which was given me according to the working of His
power.” “The grace of our Lord was exceeding abundant, with faith and
love.” “The grace which was bestowed upon me was not found vain, but I
laboured more abundantly than they all; yet not I, but the grace of
God which was with me.” “He said unto me, My grace is sufficient for
thee; My strength is made perfect in weakness.” He speaks in the same
way of grace as working in the life of believers, when he exhorts them
to “be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus”; when he tells us
of “the grace of God” exhibited in the liberality of the Macedonian
Christians, and “the exceeding grace of God” in the Corinthians; when
he encourages them: “God is able to make all grace abound in you, that
ye may abound unto every good work.” Grace is not only the power that
moves the heart of God in its compassion towards us, when He acquits
and accepts the sinner and makes him a child, but is equally the power
that moves the heart of the saint, and provides it each moment with
just the disposition and the power which it needs to love God and do
His will.
It is impossible to speak too strongly of the need there is to know
that, as wonderful and free and alone sufficient as is the grace that
pardons, is the grace that sanctifies; we are just as absolutely
dependent upon the latter as the former. We can do as little to the
one as the other. The grace that works in us must as exclusively do
all in us and through us as the grace that pardons does all for us. In
the one case as the other, everything is by faith alone. Not to
apprehend this brings a double danger. On the one hand, people think
that grace cannot be more exalted than in the bestowal of pardon on
the vile and unworthy; and a secret feeling arises that, if God be so
magnified by our sins more than anything else, we must not expect to
be freed from them in this life. With many this cuts at the root of
the life of true holiness. On the other hand, from not knowing that
grace is always and alone to do all the work in our sanctification and
fruit-bearing, men are thrown upon their own efforts, their life
remains one of feebleness and bondage under the law, and they never
yield themselves to let grace do all it would.
Let us listen to what God’s Word says: “By grace have ye been saved,
through faith; not of works, lest any man should glory. For we are His
workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore
prepared that we should walk in them.” Grace stands in contrast to
good works of our own not only before conversion, but after conversion
too. We are created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God had
prepared for us. It is grace alone can work them in us and work them
out through us. Not only the commencement but the continuance of the
Christian life is the work of grace. “Now if it is by grace it is no
more of works, otherwise grace is no more grace; therefore it is of
faith that it may be according to grace.” As we see that grace is
literally and absolutely to do all in us, so that all our actings are
the showing forth of grace in us, we shall consent to live the life of
faith–a life in which, every moment, everything is expected from God.
It is only then that we shall experience that sin shall not, never,
not for a moment, have dominion over us.
“Ye are not under the law, but under grace.” There are three possible
lives. One entirely under the law; one entirely under grace; one a
mixed life, partly law, partly grace. It is this last against which
Paul warns the Romans. It is this which is so common, and works such
ruin among Christians. Let us find out whether this is not our
position, and the cause of our low state. Let us beseech God to open
our eyes by the Holy Spirit to see that in the New Covenant
everything, every movement, every moment of our Christian life, is of
grace, abounding grace; grace abounding exceedingly, and working
mightily. Let us believe that our Covenant God waits to cause all
grace to abound toward us. And let us begin to live the life of faith
that depends upon, and trusts in, and looks to, and ever waits for
God, through Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit, to work in us that
which is pleasing in His sight.
Grace unto you, and peace be multiplied!
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THE TWO COVENANTS
CHAPTER XV
The Covenant of an Everlasting Priesthood
“That My covenant might be with Levi. My covenant was with him of life
and peace; and I gave them to him for the fear wherewith he feared Me,
and was afraid before My name. The law of truth was in his mouth, and
iniquity was not found in his lips; he walked with Me in peace and
equity, and did turn many away from iniquity.”–MAL. ii. 4-6.
ISRAEL was meant by God to be a nation of priests. In the first making
of the Covenant this was distinctly stipulated. “If ye will obey My
voice, and keep My covenant, ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of
priests.” They were to be the stewards of the oracles of God; the
channels through whom God’s knowledge and blessing were to be
communicated to the world; in them all nations were to be blessed.
Within the people of Israel one tribe was specially set apart to
embody and emphasise the priestly idea. The first-born sons of the
whole people were to have been the priests. But to secure a more
complete separation from the rest of the people, and the entire giving
up of any share in their possessions and pursuits, God chose one tribe
to be exclusively devoted to the work of proving what constitutes the
spirit and the power of priesthood. Just as the priesthood of the
whole people was part of God’s Covenant with them, so the special
calling of Levi is spoken of as God’s Covenant of Life and Peace being
with Him, as the Covenant of an everlasting priesthood. All this was
to be a picture to help them and us, in some measure, to apprehend the
priesthood of His own Blessed Son, the Mediator of the New Covenant.
Like Israel, all God’s people, under the New Covenant, are a royal
priesthood. The right of free and full access to God, the duty and
power of mediating for our fellowmen and being God’s channel of
blessing to them, is the inalienable birthright of every believer.
Owing to the feebleness and incapacity of many of God’s children,
their ignorance of the mighty grace of the New Covenant, they are
utterly impotent to take up and exercise their priestly functions. To
make up for this lack of service, to show forth the exceeding riches
of His grace in the New Covenant, and the power He gives men of
becoming, just as the priests of old were the forerunners of the Great
High Priest, His followers and representatives, God still allows and
invites those of His redeemed ones who are willing, to offer their
lives to this blessed ministry. To him who accepts the call, the New
Covenant brings in special measure what God has said: “My Covenant of
Life and Peace shall be with him”; it becomes to him in very deed “the
Covenant of an everlasting priesthood.” As the Covenant of Levi’s
priesthood issued and culminated in Christ’s, ours issues from that
again, and receives from it its blessing to dispense to the world.
To those who desire to know the conditions on which, as part of the
New Covenant, the Covenant of an everlasting priesthood can be
received and carried out, a study of the conditions on which Levi
received the priesthood will be most instructive. We are not only told
that God chose that tribe, but what there specially was in that tribe
that fitted it for the work. Malachi says: “I gave him My covenant for
the fear wherewith he feared Me, and was afraid before My name.” The
reference is to what took place at Sinai when Israel had made the
molten calf. Moses called all who were on the Lord’s side, who were
ready to avenge the dishonour done to God, to come to him. The tribe
of Levi did so, and at his bidding took their swords, and slew three
thousand of the idolatrous people (Ex. xxxii. 26-29). In the blessing
with which Moses blessed the tribes before his death, their absolute
devotion to God, without considering relative or friend, is mentioned
as the proof of their fitness for God’s service (Deut. xxxiii. 5-11):
“Let Thy Thummim and Thy Urim be with Thy holy one, who said unto his
father and to his mother, I have not known thee; neither did he
acknowledge his own brethren, nor know his own children: for they have
observed Thy word and kept Thy covenant.”
The same principle is strikingly illustrated in the story of Aaron’s
grandson, Phineas, where he, in his zeal for God, executed judgment on
disobedience to God’s command. The words are most suggestive. “And the
Lord apake unto Moses, saying, Phineas, the son of Eleazar, the son of
Aaron, hath turned away My wrath from the children of Israel, in that
he was jealous with My jealousy among them, so that I consumed them
not in My jealousy. Wherefore say, Behold, I give unto him My covenant
of peace: and it shall be unto him, and his seed after him, the
covenant of an everlasting priesthood; because he was jealous for his
God, and made an atonement for the children of Israel” (Num. xxv.
10-13). To be jealous with God’s jealousy, to be jealous for God’s
honour, and rise up against sin, is the gate into the Covenant of an
everlasting priesthood, is the secret of being entrusted by God with
the sacred work of teaching His people, and burning incense before
Him, and turning many from iniquity (Deut. xxxiii. 10; Mal. ii. 6).
Even the New Covenant is in danger of being abused by the seeking of
our own happiness or holiness, more than the honour of God or the
deliverance of men. Even where these are not entirely neglected, they
do not always take the place they are meant to have–that first place
that makes everything, the dearest and best, secondary and subordinate
to the work of helping and blessing men. A reckless disregard of
everything that would interfere with God’s will and commands, a being
jealous with God’s jealousy against sin, a witnessing and a fighting
against it at any sacrifice –this is the school of training for the
priestly office.
It is this the world needs nowadays–men of God in whom the fire of
God burns, men who can stand and speak and act in power on behalf of a
God who, amid His own people, is dishonoured by the worship of the
golden calf. Understand that as you will, of the place given to money
and rich men in the church, of the prevalence of worldliness and
luxury, or of the more subtle danger of a worship meant for the true
God, under forms taken from the Egyptians, and suited to the wisdom
and the carnal life of this world. A religion God cannot approve is
often found even where the people still profess to be in covenant with
God. “Consecrate yourselves to-day unto the Lord, even every man upon
his brother.” This call of Moses is as much needed to-day as ever. To
each one who responds there is the reward of the priesthood.
Let all who would know to the full what the New Covenant means,
remember God’s Covenant of Life and Peace with Levi. Accept of the
holy calling to be an intercessor, and to burn incense before the Lord
continually. Love, work, pray, believe, as one whom God has sought and
found to stand in the gap before Him. The New Covenant was dedicated
by a sacrifice and a death: reckon it your most wonderful privilege,
your fullest entrance into its life, as you reflect the glory of the
Lord, and are changed into the same image from glory to glory, as by
the Spirit of the Lord, to let the Spirit of that sacrifice and death
be the moving power in all your priestly functions. Sacrifice
yourself, live and die for your fellowmen.
One of the great objects with which God has made a Covenant with us,
is, as we have said so often, to waken strong confidence in Himself
and His faithfulness to His promise. And one of the objects that He
has in wakening and so strengthening the faith in us, is that He may
use us as His channels of blessing to the world. In the work of saving
men, He wants intercessory prayer to take the first place. He would
have us come to Him to receive, from Him in heaven, the spiritual life
and power which can pass out from us to them. He knows how difficult
and hopeless it is in many cases to deal with sinners; He knows that
it is no light thing for us to believe that in answer to our prayer
the mighty power of God will move to save those around us; He knows
that it needs strong faith to persevere patiently in prayer in cases
in which the answer is long delayed, and every year appears farther
off than ever. And so He undertakes, in our own experience, to prove
what faith in His Divine power can do, in bringing down all the
blessings of the New Covenant on ourselves, that we may be able to
expect confidently what we ask for others.
In our priestly life there is still another aspect. The priests had no
inheritance with their brethren; the Lord God was their inheritance.
They had access to His dwelling and His presence, that there they
might intercede for others, and thence testify of what God is and
wills. Their personal privilege and experience fitted them for their
work. If we would intercede in power, do let us live in the full
realisation of New Covenant life. It gives us not only liberty and
confidence with God, and power to persevere; it gives us power with
men, as we can testify to and prove what God has done to us. Herein is
the full glory of the New Covenant, that, like Christ, its Mediator,
we have the fire of the Divine love dwelling in us, and consuming us
in the service of men. May to each of us the chief glory of the New
Covenant be that it is the Covenant of an everlasting priesthood.
_________________________________________________________________
THE TWO COVENANTS
CHAPTER XVI
The Ministry of the New Covenant
“Ye are our epistle, written in our hearts, known and read of all men;
being made manifest that ye are an epistle of Christ, ministered by
us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God: not
in tables of stone, but in tables that are hearts of flesh. And such
confidence have we through Christ Godward: not that we are sufficient
of ourselves, to account anything as from ourselves; but our
sufficiency is from God: who also made us sufficient as ministers of a
new covenant; not of the letter, but of the Spirit; for the letter
killeth, but the Spirit giveth fife.”–2 COR. iii. 2-6.
WE have seen that the New Covenant is a ministration of the Spirit.
The Holy Spirit ministers all its grace and blessing in Divine power
and life. [8] He does this through men, who are called ministers of a
New Covenant, ministers of the Spirit. The Divine ministration of the
Covenant to men, and the earthly ministry of God’s servants, are
equally to be in the power of the Holy Spirit. The ministry of the New
Covenant has its glory and its fruit in this, that it is all to be a
demonstration of the Spirit and of power.
What a contrast this to the Old Covenant. Moses had indeed received of
the glory of God shining upon him, but had to put a veil on his face.
Israel was incapable of looking on it. In hearing and reading Moses,
there was a veil on their hearts. From Moses they might receive
knowledge and thoughts and desires,–the power of God’s Spirit, to
enable them to see the glory of what God speaks, was not yet given.
This is the exceeding glory of the New Covenant, that it is a
ministration of the Spirit; that its ministers have their sufficiency
from God, who makes them ministers of the Spirit, and makes them able
so to speak the words of God in the Spirit, that they are written in
the heart, and that the hearers become legible, living epistles of
Christ, showing the law written in their heart and life.
The ministry of the Spirit! What a glory there is in it! What a
responsibility it brings! What a sufficiency of grace there is
provided for it! What a privilege, to be a minister of the Spirit!
What tens of thousands we have throughout Christendom who are called
ministers of the gospel. What an inconceivable influence they exert
for life or for death over the millions who depend upon them for their
knowledge and participation of the Christian life. What a power there
would be if all these were ministers of the Spirit! Let us study the
word, until we see what God meant the ministry to be, and learn to
take our part in praying and labouring to have it nothing less.
God hath made us ministers of the Spirit. The first thought is that a
minister of the New Covenant must be a man personally possessed of the
Holy Spirit. There is a twofold work of the Spirit: one in giving a
holy disposition and character, the other in qualifying and empowering
a man for work. The former must always come first. The promise of
Christ to His disciples, that they should receive the Holy Spirit for
their service, was very definitely given to those who had followed and
loved Him, and kept His commandments. It is by no means enough that a
man have been born of the Spirit. If he is to be a “sufficient
minister” of the New Covenant, he must know what it is to be led by
the Spirit, to walk in the Spirit, and to say, “The law of the Spirit
of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and
death.” Who that wants to learn Greek or Hebrew would accept a
professor who hardly knows the elements of these languages? And how
can a man be a minister of the New Covenant, which is so entirely “a
ministration of the Spirit,” a ministration of heavenly life and
power, unless he knows by experience what it is to live in the Spirit?
The minister must, before everything, be a personal proof and witness
of the truth and power of God in the fulfilment of what the New
Covenant promises. Ministers are to be picked men; the best specimens
and examples of what the Holy Spirit can do to sanctify a man, and by
the working of God’s power in him to fit him for His service.
God hath made us ministers of the Spirit. Next to this thought, of
being personally possessed by the Spirit, comes the truth that all
their work in the ministry can be done in the power of the Spirit.
What an unspeakably precious assurance–Christ sends them to do a
heavenly work, to do His work, to be the instruments in His hands, by
which He works: He clothes them with a heavenly power. Their calling
is “to preach the gospel with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven.”
As far as feelings are concerned, they may have to say as Paul: “I was
with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling.” That does
not prevent their adding, nay rather, that may just be the secret of
their being able to add: “My preaching was in demonstration of the
Spirit and of power.” If a man is to be a minister of the New
Covenant, a messenger and a teacher of its true blessing, so as to
lead God’s children to live in it, nothing less will do than a full
experience of its power in himself, as the Spirit ministers it.
Whether in his feeding on God’s word himself, or his seeking in it for
God’s message for his people, whether in secret or intercessory
prayer, whether in private intercourse with souls or public teaching,
he is to wait upon, to receive, to yield to the energising of the Holy
Spirit, as the mighty power of God working with him. This is his
sufficiency for the work. He may every day afresh claim and receive
the anointing with fresh oil, the new inbreathing from Christ of His
own Spirit and life.
God hath made us ministers of the Spirit. There is something still, of
no less importance. The Minister of the Spirit must especially see to
it that he lead men to the Holy Spirit. Many will say, If he be led of
the Spirit in teaching men, is not that enough? By no means. Men may
become too dependent on him; men may take his Scripture teaching at
second-hand, and, while there is power and blessing in his ministry,
have reason to wonder that the results are not more definitely
spiritual and permanent. The reason is simple. The New Covenant is:
they shall no longer every man teach his brother, know the Lord, for
all shall know Me, from the least even to the greatest. The Father
wants every child, from the least, to live in continual personal
intercourse with Himself. This cannot be, except as he is taught and
helped to know and wait on the Holy Spirit. Bible study and prayer,
faith and love and obedience, the whole daily walk must be taught as
entirely dependent on the teaching and working of the indwelling
Spirit.
The minister of the Spirit, very definitely and perseveringly, points
away from himself to the Spirit. This is what John the Baptist did. He
was filled with the Holy Spirit from his birth, but sent men away from
himself to Christ, to be by Him baptized with the Spirit. Christ did
the same. In His farewell discourse He called His disciples to turn
from His personal instruction to the inward teaching of the Holy
Spirit, who should dwell in them, and guide them into the truth and
power of all He had taught them.
There is nothing so needed in the Church to-day. All its feebleness
and formalities and worldliness, the lack of holiness, of personal
devotion to Christ, of enthusiasm for His cause and kingdom, is owing
to one thing–the Holy Spirit is not known and honoured and yielded
to, as the one only, as the one all-sufficient source of a holy life.
The New Covenant is not known as a ministration of the Spirit in the
heart of every believer. The one thing needful for the Church is–the
Holy Spirit in His power dwelling and ruling in the lives of God’s
saints. And as one of the chief means to this there are needed
ministers of the Spirit, themselves living in the enjoyment and power
of this great gift, who persistently labour to bring their brethren
into the possession of their birthright: the Holy Spirit in the heart,
maintaining, in Divine power, an unceasing communion with the Son and
with the Father. The ministration of the Spirit makes the ministry of
the Spirit possible and effectual. And the ministry of the Spirit
again makes the ministration of the Spirit an actual experimental
reality in the life of the Church.
We know how dependent the Church is on its ministry. The converse is
no less true. The ministers are dependent on the Church. They are its
children; they breathe its atmosphere; they share its health or
sickliness; they are dependent upon its fellowship and intercession.
Let none of us think that all that the New Covenant calls us to is to
see that we personally accept and rejoice in its blessings. No,
indeed; God wants everyone who enters into it to know that its
privileges are for all His children, and to give himself to make this
known. And there is no more effectual way of doing this than taking
thought for the ministry of the Church. Compare the ministry around
you with its pattern in God’s word (see specially 1 Cor. ii.; 2 Cor.
iii.). Join with others who know how the New Covenant is nothing, if
it be not a ministration of the Spirit, and cry to God for a spiritual
ministry. Ask the leading of God the Holy Ghost to teach you what can
be done, what you can do, to have the ministry of your Church become a
truly spiritual one. Human condemnation will do as little good as
human approbation. It is as the supreme place of the Holy Spirit, as
the representative and revealer of the Father and the Son, is made
clear to us, that the one desire of our heart, and our continual
prayer, will be, that God would so discover to all the ministers of
His word their heavenly calling, that they may, above everything, seek
this one thing,–to be sufficient ministers of the New Covenant, not
of the letter, but of the Spirit.
_________________________________________________________________
[8] It may be well to read again and compare Chapter VII.: “The New
Covenant: a Ministration of the Spirit.”)
_________________________________________________________________
THE TWO COVENANTS
CHAPTER XVII
His Holy Covenant
“To remember His Holy Covenant; to grant unto us that we, being
delivered out of the hands of our enemies, should serve Him without
fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him, all our days.”-LUKE i.
68-75.
WHEN Zacharias was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied, he
spoke of God’s visiting and redeeming His people, as a remembering of
His Holy Covenant. He speaks of what the blessings of that Covenant
would be, not in words that had been used before, but in what is
manifestly a Divine revelation to him by the Holy Spirit; and gathers
up all the former promises in these words: “That we should serve Him
without fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him all the days of
our life.” Holiness in life and service is to be the great gift of the
Covenant of God’s Holiness. As we have seen before, the Old Covenant
proclaimed and demanded holiness; the New provides it; holiness of
heart and life is its great blessing.
There is no attribute of God so difficult to define, so peculiarly a
matter of Divine revelation, so mysterious, incomprehensible, and
inconceivably glorious, as His Holiness. It is that by which He is
specially worshipped in His majesty on the throne of heaven (Isa. vi.
2; Rev. iv. 8, xv. 4). It unites His righteousness, that judges and
condemns, with His love, that saves and blesses. As the Holy One He is
a consuming fire (Isa. x. 17); as the Holy One He loves to dwell among
His people (Isa. xii. 6). As the Holy One He is at an infinite
distance from us; as the Holy One He comes inconceivably near, and
makes us one with, makes us like Himself. The one purpose of His holy
Covenant is to make us holy as He is holy.
As the Holy One He says: “I am holy; be ye holy; I am the Lord which
hallow you, which make you holy.” The highest conceivable summit of
blessedness is our being partakers of the Divine nature, of the Divine
holiness.
This is the great blessing Christ, the Mediator of the New Covenant,
brings. He has been made unto us “both righteousness and
sanctification”–righteousness in order to, as a preparation for,
sanctification [9] or holiness. He prayed to the Father: ” Sanctify
them; for their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they themselves may also
be sanctified in truth.” In Him we are sanctified, saints, holy ones
(Rom. i. 7; 1 Cor. i. 2). We have put on the new man which after God
is created in righteousness and holiness. Holiness is our very nature.
We are holy in Christ. As we believe it, as we receive it, as we yield
ourselves to the truth, and draw nigh to God to have the holiness
drawn forth and revealed in fellowship with Him, its fountain, we
shall know how divinely true it is.
It is for this the Holy Spirit has been given in our hearts. He is the
“Spirit of Holiness.” His every working is in the power of holiness.
Paul says : “God hath chosen us unto salvation, in sanctification of
the Spirit and belief of the truth.” As simple and entire as is our
dependence on the word of truth, as the external means, must our
confidence be in the hidden power for holiness which the working of
the Spirit brings. The connection between God’s electing purpose, and
the work of the Spirit, with the word we obey, comes out with equal
clearness in Peter: “Elect, in sanctification of the Spirit, unto
obedience.” The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the life of Christ; as we
know, and honour, and trust Him, we shall learn and also experience
that, in the New Covenant, as the ministration of the Spirit, the
sanctification, the holiness of the Holy Spirit is our covenant right.
We shall be assured that, as God has promised, so He will work it in
us, that we “should serve Him without fear, in righteousness and
holiness before Him, all the days of our life.” With a treasure of
holiness in Christ, and the very Spirit of holiness in our hearts, we
can live holy lives. That is, if we believe Him “who worketh in us
both to will and to work.”
In the light of this Covenant promise, with the Blessed Son and the
Holy Spirit to work it out in us, what new meaning is given to the
teaching of the New Testament. Take the first epistle St. Paul ever
wrote. It was directed to men who had only a few months previously
been turned from idols to serve the Living God, and to wait for His
Son from heaven. The words he speaks in regard to the holiness they
might aim at and expect, because God was going to work it in them, are
so grand that many Christians pass them by, as practically
unintelligible (1 Thess. iii. 13): “The Lord make you to increase and
abound in love, to the end He may stablish your hearts unblamable in
holiness at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all His saints.” That
promises holiness, unblamable holiness, a heart unblamable in
holiness, a heart stablished in all this by God Himself. Paul might
indeed say of a word like this: “Who hath believed our report?” He had
written of himself (ii. 10) : “Ye know how holily and righteously and
unblamably we behaved ourselves.” He assures them that what God has
done for him He will do for them–give them hearts unblameable in
holiness. The Church believes so little in the mighty power of God,
and the truth of His Holy Covenant, that the grace of such
heart-holiness is hardly spoken of. The verse is often quoted in
connection with “the coming of our Lord Jesus with His saints”; but
its real point and glory,–that when He comes we may meet Him with
hearts stablished unblamable in holiness by God Himself: all too
little this is understood or proclaimed or expected.
Or take another verse in the Epistle (v. 21), also spoken to these
young converts from heathenism, in reference to the coming of our
Lord. Some think that to speak much of the coming of the Lord will
make us holy. Alas! how little it has done so in many .cases. It is
the New Covenant Holiness, wrought by God Himself in us, believed in
and waited for from Him, that can make our waiting differ from the
carnal expectations of the Jews or the disciples. Listen-“THE GOD OF
PEACE HIMSELF “–that is the keynote of the New Covenant–what you
never can do God will work in you–“SANCTIFY YOU WHOLLY”; this you may
ask and expect,–“and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved
entire, UNBLAMABLE, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” And now,
as if to meet the doubt that will arise: “Faithful is He that calleth
you, WHO WILL ALSO DO IT.” Again it is the secret of the New
Covenant–what hath not entered into the heart of man,-GOD WILL WORK
in them that wait for Him. Until the Church.awakes to see and believe
that our holiness is to be the immediate almighty working of the
Three-One God in us, and that our whole religion must be an unceasing
dependence to receive it direct from Himself, these promises remain a
sealed book.
Let us now return to the prophecy of the Holy Spirit by Zacharias, of
God’s remembering the Covenant of His Holiness, to make us holy, to
stablish our hearts unblamable in holiness, that we should serve Him
IN HOLINESS AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. Note how every word is significant.
To grant us. It is to be a gift from above. The promise given with the
Covenant was: “I the Lord have spoken it; I will perform it.” We need
to beseech God to show us both what He will do, and that He will do
it. When our faith expects all from Him, the blessing will be found.
“That we, being delivered out of the hands of our enemaes.” He had
just before said: He hath raised up an horn of salvation for us;
salvation from our enemies and the hand of all that hate us. It is
only a free people can serve a Holy God, or be holy. It is only as the
teaching of Rom. vi.-viii. is experienced, and I know what it is that
we are “freed from sin,” and “freed from the law,” and that “the
Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin
and death,” that in the perfect liberty from every power that could
hinder, I can expect God to do His mighty work in me.
Should serve Him. My servant does not serve me by spending all his
time in getting himself ready for work, but in doing my work. The Holy
Covenant sets us free, and endows us with Divine grace, that God may
have us for His work,–the same work Christ began, and we now carry
on.
Without fear. In childlike confidence and boldness before God. And
before men too. A freedom from fear in every difficulty, because
having learnt to know that God works all in us we can trust Him to
work all for us and through us.
Before Him. With His continued unceasing presence all the day, as the
unceasing security of our obedience and our fearlessness, the
neverfailing secret of our being sanctified wholly.
All our days. Not only all the day for one day, but for every day,
because Jesus is a High Priest in the power of an endless life, and
the mighty operation of God as promised in the Covenant is as
unchanging as is God Himself. Is it not as if you begin to see that
God’s word does appear to mean more than you have ever conceived of or
expected? It is well that it should be so. It is only when you begin
to say, Glory to Him who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all
we can ask or think, and expect God’s almighty, supernatural,
altogether immeasurable power and grace to work out the New Covenant
life in you, and to make you holy, that you will really come to the
place of helplessness and dependence where God can work.
I pray you, my Brother, do believe that God’s word is true, and say
with Zacharias, ” Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who bath
visited His people, to remember HIS HOLY COVENANT, and to grant us,
that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, should serve
Him without fear, in holiness rind righteousness before Him, all our
days.”
_________________________________________________________________
[9] Remember that the words sanctify, sanctity, saint are the same as
make holy, holiness, holy one.
_________________________________________________________________
THE TWO COVENANTS
CHAPTER XVIII
Entering the Covenant: with all the Heart
“And they entered into the covenant to seek the Lord God of their
fathers with all their heart, and all their soul.”–2 CHRON. xv. 12
(see xxxiv. 31, and 2 Kings xxiii. 3).
“The Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart, to love the Lord thy
God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul.”–DEUT. xxx. 6.
“And I will give them an heart to know Me, that I am the Lord; and
they shall be My people, and I will be their God: for they shall turn
to Me with their whole heart.”–JER. xxiv. 7 (see xxix. 13).
“I will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn
away from them, to do them good; but I will put My fear in their
hearts, that they shall not depart from Me. Yea, I will rejoice over
them to do them good, with My whole heart and My whole soul.”–JER.
xxxii. 40.
IN the days of Asa, Hezekiah, and Josiah, we read of Israel entering
into “the Covenant” with their whole heart, “to perform the words of
the Covenant which are written in the book.” Of Asa’s day, we read:
“They sware unto the Lord; and all Judah rejoiced at the oath, for
they had sworn with their whole heart, and sought Him with their whole
desire; and He was found of them.” Wholeheartedness is the secret of
entering the Covenant, and God being found of us in it.
Wholeheartedness is the secret of joy in religion–a full entrance
into all the blessedness the Covenant brings. God rejoices over His
people to do them good, with His whole heart and His whole soul: it
needs, on our part, our whole heart and our whole soul to enter into
and enjoy this joy of God in doing us good with His whole heart and
His whole soul. With what measure we mete, it shall be measured unto
us again.
If we have at all understood the teaching of God’s word in regard to
the New Covenant, we know what it reveals in regard to the two parties
who meet in it. On God’s side there is the promise to do for us and in
us all that we need to serve and enjoy Him. He will rejoice in doing
us good, with His whole heart. He will be our God, doing for us all
that a God can do, giving Himself as God to be wholly ours. And on our
side there is the prospect held out of our being able, in the power of
what He engages to do, to “turn to Him with our whole heart,” “to love
Him with all our heart and all our strength.” The first and great
commandment, the only possible terms on which God can fully reveal
Himself, or give Himself to His creature to enjoy, is, “Thou shalt
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart.” That law is unchangeable.
The New Covenant comes and brings us the grace to obey, by lifting us
into the love of God as the air we breathe, and enabling us, in the
faith of that grace, to rise and be of good courage, and with our
whole heart to yield ourselves to the God of the Covenant, and the
life in His service.
Wholeheartedness in the love and the service of God! how shall I speak
of it? Of its imperative necessity? It is the one unalterable
condition of true communion with God, of which nothing can supply the
want. Of its infinite reasonableness? With such a God, a very Fountain
of all that is loving and lovely, of all that is good and blessed, the
All-glorious God: surely there cannot for a moment be a thought of
anything else being His due, or of our consenting to offer Him
anything less, than the love of the whole heart. Of its unspeakable
blessedness? To love Him with the whole heart, this is the only
possible way of receiving His great love into our heart and rejoicing
in it–yielding oneself to that mighty love, and allowing God Himself,
just as an earthly love enters into us and makes us glad, to give us
the taste and the joy of the heavenliness of that love. Of its
terrible lack? Yes, what shall I speak of this ? Where find words to
open the eyes and reach the heart, and show how almost universal is
the lack of true wholeheartedness in the faith and love of God, in the
desire to love Him with the whole heart, in the sacrifice of
everything to possess Him, to please Him, to be wholly possessed of
Him? And then of the blessed certainty of its attainableness? The
Covenant has provided for it. The Triune God will work it by taking
possession of the heart, and dwelling there. The Blessed Mediator of
the Covenant undertakes for all we have to do. His constraining love
shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit can bring it and maintain
it. Yes, I ask how shall I speak of all this?
Have we not spoken enough of it already in this book? Do we not need
something more than words and thoughts? Is not what we need rather
this–quietly to turn to the Holy Spirit who dwells in us, and in the
faith of the light and the strength our Lord gives through Him, accept
and act out what God tells us of the God-given heart He has placed
within us, the God-wrought wholeheartedness He works? Surely the new
heart which has been given us to love God with, with God’s Spirit in
it, is wholly for God. Let our faith accept and rejoice in the
wondrous gift, and not fear to say: I will love Thee, O Lord, with my
whole heart. Just think for a moment of what it means that God has
given us such a heart.
We know what God’s giving means. His giving depends on our taking. He
does not force upon us spiritual possessions. He promises, and gives,
in such measure as desire and faith are ready to receive. He gives in
Divine power; as faith yields itself to that power, and accepts the
gift, it becomes consciously and experimentally our possession.
As spiritual gifts God’s bestowings are not recognised by sense or
reason. “Ear hath not heard, neither have entered into the heart of
man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But
God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit. We have received the
Spirit which is of God, that we might know the things which are freely
given us of God.” It is as you yield yourself to be led and taught by
the Spirit, that your faith will be able, despite of all lack of
feeling, to rejoice in the possession of the new heart, and all that
is given with it.
Then, this Divine giving is continuous. I bestow a gift on a man; he
takes it, and I never see him again. So God bestows temporal gifts on
men, and they never think of Him. But spiritual gifts are only to be
received and enjoyed in unceasing communication with God Himself. The
new heart is not a power I have in myself, like the natural endowments
of thinking or loving. No, it is only in unceasing dependence upon, in
close contact with God, that the heavenly gift of a new heart can be
maintained uninjured, can day by day become stronger. It is only in
God’s immediate presence, in unbroken direct dependence on Him, that
spiritual endowments are preserved.
Then, further, spiritual gifts can only be enjoyed by acting them out
in faith. None of the graces of the Christian life, like love, or
meekness, or boldness, can be felt or known, much less strengthened,
until we begin to exercise them, We must not wait to feel them, or to
feel the strength for them; we must, in the obedience of the faith
that they are given us, and hidden within us, practise them. Whatever
we read of the new heart, and of all God has given into it in the New
Covenant, must be boldly believed and carried out into action.
All this is especially true of wholeheartedness, and loving God with
all our heart. You may at first be very ignorant of all it implies.
God has planted the new heart in the midst of the flesh, which, with
its animating principle, SELF, has to be denied, to be kept crucified,
and by the Holy Spirit to be mortified. God has placed you in the
midst of a world, from which, with all that is of it and its spirit,
you are to come out and be entirely separate. God has given you your
work in His kingdom, for which He asks all your interest, and time,
and strength. In all these three respects you need wholeheartedness,
to enable you to make the sacrifices that may be required. If you take
the ordinary standard of Christian life around you, you will find that
wholeheartedness, intense devotion to God and His service, is hardly
thought of. How to make the best of both worlds, innocently to enjoy
as much as possible of this present life, is the ruling principle,
and, as a natural consequence, the present world secures the larger
share of interest. To please self is considered legitimate, and the
Christlike life of not pleasing self has little place.
Wholeheartedness will lead you, and. enable you too, to accept
Christ’s command and sell all for the pearl of great price. Though at
first afraid of what it may involve, do not hesitate to speak the word
frequently in the ear of your Father: with my whole heart. You may
count on the Holy Spirit to open up its meaning, to show you to what
service or what sacrifice God calls you in it, to increase its power,
to reveal its blessedness, to make it the very spirit of your life of
devotion to your Covenant God.
And now, who is ready to enter into this New and Everlasting Covenant
with his whole heart? Let each of us do it.
Begin by asking God very humbly to give you by the Spirit, who dwells
in you, the vision of the heavenly life of wholehearted love and
obedience, as it has actually been prepared for you in Christ. It is
an existing reality, a spiritual endowment out of the life of God
which can come upon you. It is secured to you in the Covenant, and in
Christ Jesus, its Surety. Ask earnestly, definitely, believingly, that
God reveal this to you. Rest not till you know fully what your Father
means you to be, and has provided for your most certainly being.
When you begin to see why the New Covenant was given, and what it
promises, and how divinely certain its promises are, offer yourself to
God unreservedly to be taken up into, it. Offer, if He will take you
in, to love Him with your whole heart, and to obey Him with all your
strength. Hold not back, be not afraid. God has sworn to do you good
with His whole heart: do say, do not hesitate to say, that into this
Covenant, in which He promises to cause you to turn to Him and to love
Him with your whole heart, you now with your whole heart enter. If
there be any fear, just ask again and believingly for a vision of the
Covenant life: God swearing to do you good with His whole heart; God
undertaking to make and enable you to love and obey Him with your
whole heart. The vision of this life will make you bold to say: Into
this Covenant of a wholehearted love in God and in me I do with my
whole heart now enter: here will I dwell.
Let us close and part with this one thought. A redeeming God,
rejoicing with His whole heart and whole soul to do us good, and to
work in us all that is well-pleasing in His sight: this is the one
side. Such is the God of the Covenant. Gaze upon Him. Believe Him.
Worship Him. Wait upon Him, until the fire begin to burn, and your
heart be drawn out with all its might to love this God. Then the other
side. A redeemed soul, rejoicing with all its heart and all its soul
in the love of this God, entering into the covenant of wholehearted
love, and venturing, ere it knows, to say to Him: With my whole heart
I do love Thee, God, my exceeding joy. Such are the children of the
Covenant.
Beloved reader! rest not till you have entered in, through the Gate
Beautiful, through Christ the door, into this temple of the love, of
the heart, of God.
_________________________________________________________________
NOTES
NOTE A.–CHAP. II
The Second Blessing
IN the life of the believer there sometimes comes a crisis, as clearly
marked as his conversion, in which he passes out of a life of
continual feebleness and failure to one of strength, and victory, and
abiding rest. The transition has been called the Second Blessing. Many
have objected to the phrase, as being unscriptural, or as tending to
make a rule for all, what was only a mode of experience in some.
Others have used it as helping to express clearly in human words what
ought to be taught to believers as a possible deliverance from the
ordinary life of the Christian, to one of abiding fellowship with God,
and entire devotion to His service. In introducing it into the title
of this book, I have indicated my belief that, rightly understood, the
words express a scriptural truth, and may be a help to believers in
putting clearly before them what they may expect from God. Let me try
and make clear how I think we ought to understand it.
I have connected the expression with the two Covenants. Why was it
that God made two Covenants–not one, and not three? Because there
were two parties concerned. In the First Covenant man was to prove
what he could do, and what he was. In the Second, God would show what
He would do. The former was the time of needed preparation; the
latter, the time of Divine fulfilment. The same necessity as there was
for this in the race, exists in the individual too. Conversion makes
of a sinner a child of God, full of ignorance and weakness, without
any conception of what the whole-hearted devotion is that God asks of
him, or the full possession God is ready to take of him. In some cases
the transition from the elementary stage is by a gradual growth and
enlightenment. But experience teaches, that in the great majority of
cases this healthy growth is not found. To those who have never found
the secret of a healthy growth, of victory over sin and perfect rest
in God, and have possibly despaired of ever finding it, because all
their efforts have been failures, it has often been a wonderful help
to learn that it is possible by a single decisive step, bringing them
into a right relationship to Christ, His Spirit, and His strength, to
enter upon an entirely new life.
What is needed to help a man to take that step is very simple. He must
see and confess the wrongness, the sin, of the life he is living, not
in harmony with God’s will. He must see and believe in the life which
Scripture holds out, which Christ Jesus promises to work and maintain
in him. As he sees that his failure has been owing to his striving in
his own strength, and believes that our Lord Jesus will actually work
all in him in Divine power, he takes courage, and dares surrender
himself to Christ anew. Confessing and giving up all that is of self
and sin, yielding himself wholly to Christ and His service, he
believes and receives a new power to live his life by the faith of the
Son of God. The change is in many cases as clear, as marked, as
wonderful, as conversion. For lack of a better name, that of A Second
Blessing came most naturally.
When once it is seen how greatly this change is needed in the life of
most Christians, and how entirely it rests on faith in Christ and His
power, as revealed in the Word, all doubt as to its scripturalness
will be removed. And when once its truth is seen, we shall be
surprised to find how, throughout Scripture, in history and teaching,
we find what illustrates and confirms it.
Take the twofold passage of Israel through water, first out of Egypt,
then into Canaan. The wilderness journey was the result of unbelief
and disobedience, allowed by God to humble them, and prove them, and
show what was in their heart. When this purpose had been accomplished,
a second blessing led them through Jordan as mightily into Canaan, as
the first had brought them through the Red Sea out of Egypt.
Or take the Holy Place and the Holiest of All, as types of the life in
the two covenants, and equally in the two stages of Christian
experience. In the former, very real access to God and fellowship with
Him, but always with a veil between. In the latter, the full access,
through a rent veil, into the immediate presence of God, and the full
experience of the power of the heavenly life. As the eyes are opened
to see how terribly the average Christian life comes short of God’s
purpose, and how truly the mingled life can be expelled by the power
of a new revelation of what God waits to do, the types of Scripture
will shine with a new meaning.
Or look to the teachings of the New Testament. In Romans, Paul
contrasts the life of the Christian under the law with that under
grace, the spirit of bondage with the Spirit of adoption. What does
this mean but that Christians may still be living under the law and
its bondage, that they need to come out of this into the full life of
grace and liberty through the Holy Spirit, and that, when first they
see the difference, nothing is needed but the surrender of faith, to
accept and experience what grace will do by the Holy Spirit.
To the Corinthians, Paul writes of some being carnal, and still babes,
walking as men after the flesh; others being spiritual, with spiritual
discernment and character. To the Galatians, he speaks of the liberty
with which Christ, by the Spirit, makes free from the law, in contrast
to those who sought to perfect in the flesh, what was begun in the
Spirit, and who gloried in the flesh;–all to call them to recognise
the danger of the carnal, divided life, and to come at once to the
life of faith, the life in the Spirit, which alone is according to
God’s will.
Everywhere we see in Scripture, what the state of the Church at the
present day confirms, that conversion is only the gate that leads into
the path of life, and that within that gate there is still great
danger of mistaking the path, of turning aside, or turning back, and
that where this has taken place we are called at once, and with our
whole heart, to turn and give ourselves to nothing less than all that
Christ is willing to work in us. Just as there are many who have
always thought that conversion must be slow, and gradual, and
uncertain, and cannot understand how it can be sudden and final,
because they only take man’s powers into account, so many cannot see
how the revelation of the true life of holiness, and the entrance on
it by faith out of a life of self-effort and failure, may be immediate
and permanent. They look too much to man’s efforts, and know not how
the second blessing is nothing more nor less than a new vision of what
Christ is willing to work in us, and the surrender of faith that
yields all to Him.
I would fain hope that what I have written in this book may help some
to see that the second blessing is just what they need, is what God by
His Spirit will work in them, is nothing but the acceptance of Christ
in all His saving power as our strength and life, and is what will
bring them into, and fit them for, that full life in the New Covenant,
in which God works all in all.
Let me close this note with a quotation from the introduction to a
little book just published, Dying to Self: A Golden Dialogue, by
William Law, with notes by A.M.: “A great deal has been said against
the use of the terms, the Higher Life, the Second Blessing. In Law one
finds nothing of such language, but of the deep truth of which they
are the, perhaps defective, expression, his book is full. The points
on which so much stress is laid in what is called Keswick teaching,
stand prominently out in his whole argument. The low state of the
average life of believers, the cause of all failure as coming from
self-confidence, the need of an entire surrender of the whole being to
the operation of God, the call to turn to Christ as the One and Sure
Deliverer from the power of self, the Divine certainty of a better
life for all who will in self-despair trust Christ for it, and the
heavenly joy of a life in which the Spirit of Love fills the
heart–these truths are common to both. What makes Law’s putting of
the truth of special value is the way in which he shows how humility
and utter self-despair, with the resignation to God’s mighty working
in simple faith, is the infallible way to be delivered from self, and
have the Spirit of Love born in the heart.”
_________________________________________________________________
NOTE B.–CHAP. IV
The Law written in the Heart
THE thought of the law written in the heart sometimes causes
difficulty and discouragement, because believers do not see or feel in
themselves anything corresponding to it. An illustration may help to
remove the difficulty. There are fluids by which you can write so that
nothing is visible, either at once or later, unless the writing be
exposed to the sun or the action of some chemical. The writing is
there, but one who is ignorant of the process cannot think it is
there, and knows not how to make it readable. The faith of a man who
is in the secret believes in it though he see it not.
It is even thus with the new heart. God has put His law into it,
“Blessed are the people in whose heart is God’s law.” But it is there
invisibly. He that takes God’s promise in faith, knows that it is in
his own heart. As long. as there is not clear faith on this point, all
attempts to find it, or to fulfil that law, will be vain. But when by
a simple faith the promise is held fast, the first step is taken to
realise it. The soul is then prepared to receive instruction as to
what the writing of the law in the heart means. It means, first, that
God has implanted in the new heart a love of God’s law, and a
readiness to do all His will. You may not feel this disposition there,
but it is there. God has put it there. Believe this, and be assured
that there is in you a Divine nature that says–and you therefore do
not hesitate to say it–“I delight to do Thy will, O God!” In the name
of God, and in faith, say it.
This writing of the law means, further, that in planting this
principle in you, God has taken all that you know of God’s will
already, and inspired that new heart with the readiness to obey it. It
may as yet be written there with invisible writing, and you are not
conscious of it. That does not matter. You have here to deal with a
Divine and hidden work of the Holy Spirit. Be not afraid to say: Oh,
how love I Thy law! God has put the love of it into your heart, the
new heart. He has taken away the stony heart; it is by the new heart
you have to live.
The next thing implied in this writing of the law, is that you have
accepted all God’s will, even what you do not yet know, as the delight
of your heart. In giving yourself up to God, you gave yourself wholly
to His will. That was the one condition of your entering the Covenant;
Covenant grace will now provide for teaching you to know, and
strengthening you to do, all your Father would have you do.
The whole life in the New Covenant is a life of faith. Faith accepts
every promise of the Covenant, is certain that it is being fulfilled,
looks confidently to the God of the Covenant to do His work. Faith
believes implicitly in the new heart, with the law written in it,
because it believes in the promise, and in the God who gave and
fulfils the promise.
It may be well to add here that the same truth holds good of all the
promises concerning the new heart–they must be accepted and acted on
by faith. When we read of “the love of God shed abroad in the heart by
the Holy Spirit,” of “Christ dwelling in the heart,” of “a clean
heart,” of “loving each other with a clean heart fervently,” of “God
establishing our heart unblamable in holiness,” we must; with the eye
of faith, regard these spiritual realities as actually and in very
deed existing within us. In His hidden unseen way God is working them
there. Not by sight or feeling, but by faith in the Living God and His
Word, we know they are as the power for the dispositions and
inclinations of the new heart. In this faith we are to act, knowing
that we have the power to love, to obey, to be holy. The New Covenant
gives us a God who works all in us; faith in Him gives us the
assurance, above and beyond all feeling, that this God is doing His
blessed work.
And if the question be asked what we are to think of all there is
within us that contradicts this faith, let us remember what Scripture
teaches us of it. We sometimes speak of an old and a new heart.
Scripture does not do so. It speaks of the old, the stony, heart,
being taken away–the heart, with its will, disposition, affections,
being made new with a Divine newness. This new heart is placed in the
midst of what Scripture calls the flesh, in which there dwelleth no
good thing. We shall find it a great advantage to adhere as closely as
possible to Scripture language. It will greatly help our faith even to
use the very words God by His Holy Spirit has used to teach us. And it
will greatly clear our view for knowing what to think of the sin that
remains in us if we think of it and deal with it in the light of God’s
truth. Every evil desire and affection comes from the flesh, man’s
sinful natural life. It owes its power greatly to our ignorance of its
nature, and our trusting to its help and strength to cast out its
evil. I have already pointed out how sinful flesh and religious flesh
is one, and how all failure in religion is owing to a secret trust in
ourselves. As we accept and make use of what God says of the flesh, we
shall see in it the source of all evil in us; we shall say of its
temptations: “It is no more I, but sin that dwelleth in me”; we shall
maintain our integrity as we maintain a good conscience that condemns
us for nothing knowingly done against God’s will; and we shall be
strong in the faith of the Holy Spirit, who dwells in the new heart,
so to strengthen that we need not and ” shall not fulfil the lusts of
the flesh.”
I conclude with an extract of an address by Rev. F. Webster, at
Keswick last year, in confirmation of what I have just said: “Put ye
on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to
fulfil the lusts thereof. `Make no provision for the flesh.’ The flesh
is there, you know. To deny or ignore the existence of an enemy is to
give him a great chance against you; and the flesh is in the believer
to the very end, a force of evil to be reckoned with continually, an
evil force inside a man, and yet, thank God, a force which can be so
dealt with by the power of God, that it shall have no power to defile
the heart or deflect the will. The flesh is in you, but your heart may
be kept clean moment by moment in spite of the existence of evil in
your fallen nature. Every avenue, every opening that leads into the
heart, every thought and desire and purpose and imagination of your
being, may be closed against the flesh, so that there shall be no
opening to come in and defile the heart or deflect the will from the
will of God.
“You say that is a very high standard. But it is the Word of God.
There is to be no secret sympathy with sin. Although the flesh is
there, you are to make it no excuse for sins. You are not to say, I am
naturally irritable, anxious, jealous, and I cannot help letting these
things crop up; they come from within. Yes, they come from within, but
then there need be no provision, no opening in your heart for these
things to enter. Your heart can be barricaded with an impassable
barrier against these things. `No provision for the flesh.’ Not merely
the front door barred and bolted so that you do not invite them to
come in, but the side and back door closed too. You may be so
Christ-possessed and Christ-enclosed that you shall positively hate
everything that is of the flesh.
“`Make no provision for the flesh.’ The only way to do so is to `put
on the Lord Jesus Christ.’ I spoke of the heart being so barricaded
that there should be no entrance to it, that the flesh should never be
able to defile it or deflect the will from the will of God. How can
that be done? By putting on the Lord Jesus Christ. It has been such a
blessing to me just to learn that one secret, just to learn the
positive side of deliverance–putting on the Lord Jesus Christ.”
_________________________________________________________________
NOTE C.–CHAP. VII
George Muller and his Second Conversion
IN the life of George Muller of Bristol there was an epoch, four years
after his conversion, to which he ever after looked back, and of which
he often spoke, as his entrance into the true Christian life.
In an address given to ministers and workers after his ninetieth
birthday, he spoke thus of it himself: “That leads to another
thought–the full surrender of the heart to God. I was converted in
November 1825, but I only came, into the full surrender of the heart
four years later, in July 1829. The love of money was gone, the love
of place was gone, the love of position was gone, the love of worldly
pleasures and engagements was gone. God, God, God alone became my
portion. I found my all in Him; I wanted nothing else. And by the
grace of God this has remained, and has made me a happy man, an
exceedingly happy man, and it led me to care only about the things of
God. I ask, affectionately, my beloved brethren, have you fully
surrendered the heart to God, or is there this thing or that thing
with which you are taken up irrespective of God? I read a little of
the Scriptures before, but preferred other books, but since that time
the revelation He has made of Himself has become unspeakably blessed
to me, and I can say from my heart, God is an infinitely lovely Being.
Oh! be not satisfied until in your inmost soul you can say, God is an
infinitely lovely Being!”
The account he gives of this change in his journal is as follows. He
speaks of one whom he had heard preach at Teignmouth, where he had
gone for the sake of his health. “Though I did not like all he said,
yet I saw a gravity and solemnity in him different from the rest.
Through the instrumentality of this brother the Lord bestowed a great
blessing upon me, for which I shall have cause to thank Him throughout
eternity. God then began to show me that the Word of God alone is to
be our standard of judgment in spiritual things; that it can only be
explained by the Holy Spirit, and that in our day, as well as in
former times, He is the Teacher of His people. The office of the Holy
Spirit I had not experimentally understood before that time. I had not
before seen that the Holy Spirit alone can teach us about our state by
nature, show us our need of a Saviour, enable us to believe in Christ,
explain to us the Scriptures, help us in preaching, etc.
“It was my beginning to understand this point in particular which had
a great effect on me; for the Lord enabled me to put it to the test of
experience by laying aside commentaries and almost every other book,
and simply reading the Word of God and studying it. The result of this
was that the first evening that I shut myself into my room to give
myself to prayer and meditation over the Scriptures, I learned more in
a few hours than I had done during a period of several months
previously. But the particular difference was that I received real
strength in my soul in doing so.
“In addition to this, it pleased the Lord to lead me to see a higher
standard of devotedness than I had seen before. He led me, in a
measure, to see what is my glory in this world, even to be despised,
to be poor and mean with Christ . . . I returned to London much better
in body. And as to my soul, the change was so great that it was like a
second conversion.”
In another passage he speaks thus: “I fell into the snare into which
so many young believers fall, the reading of religious books is
preferred to the Scriptures. Now the scriptural way of reasoning would
have been: God Himself has condescended to become an author, and I am
ignorant of that precious Book which His Holy Spirit has caused to be
written; therefore I ought to read again this Book of books most
earnestly, most prayerfully, and with much meditation. Instead of
acting thus, and being led by my ignorance of the Word to study it
more, my difficulty of understanding it made me careless of reading
it, and then, like many believers, I practically preferred for the
first four years of my Christian life, the works of uninspired men to
the oracles of the Living God. The consequence was that I remained a
babe, both in knowledge and grace. In knowledge, I say, for all true
knowledge must be derived by the Spirit from the Word. This lack of
knowledge most sadly kept me back from walking steadily in the ways of
God. For it is the truth makes us free, by delivering us from the
slavery of the lusts of the flesh, the lusts of the eyes, and the
pride of life. The Word proves it, the experience of the saints proves
it, and also my own experience most decidedly proves it. For when it
pleased the Lord, in August 1829, to bring me really to the
Scriptures, my life and walk became very different.
“If anyone would ask me how he may read the Scriptures most
profitably, I would answer him:–
“1. Above all he must seek to have it settled in his own mind that God
alone, by the Holy spirit, can teach him, and that, therefore, as God
will be inquired for all blessings, it becomes him to seek for God’s
blessing previous to reading, and also while reading.
“2. He should also have it settled in his mind that though the Holy
spirit is the best and sufficient Teacher, yet that He does not always
teach immediately when we desire it, and that, therefore, we may have
to entreat Him again and again for the explanation of certain
passages; but that He will surely teach us at last, if we will seek
for light prayerfully, patiently, and for the glory of God.”
Just one more passage, from an address given on his ninetieth
birthday: “For sixty-nine years and ten months he had been a very
happy man. That he attributed to two things. He had maintained a good
conscience, not wilfully going on in a course he knew to be contrary
to the mind of God; he did not, of course, mean that he was perfect;
he was poor, weak, and sinful. Secondly, he attributed it to his love
of Holy Scripture. Of late years his practice had been four times
every year to read through the Scriptures, with application to his own
heart, and with meditation; and that day he was a greater lover of
God’s Word than he was sixty-six years ago. It was this, and
maintaining a good conscience, that had given him all these years
peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.”
In connection with what has been said about the New Covenant being a
ministration of the Spirit this narrative is most instructing. It
shows us how George Muller’s power lay in God’s revealing to him the
work of the Holy Spirit. He writes that up to the time of that change
he had “not experimentally understood the office of the Holy Spirit.”
We speak much of George Muller’s power in prayer; it is of importance
to remember that that power was entirely owing to his love of, and
faith in, God’s Word. But it is of still more importance to notice
that his power to believe God’s Word so fully was entirely owing to
his having learned to know the Holy Spirit as his Teacher. When the
words of God are explained to us, and made living within us by the
Holy Spirit, they have a power to awaken faith which they otherwise
have not. The Word then brings us into contact with God, comes to us
as from God direct, and binds our whole life to Him.
When the Holy Spirit thus feeds us on the Word, our whole life comes
under His power, and the fruit is seen, not only in the power of
prayer, but as much in the power of obedience. Notice how Mr. Muller
tells us this, that the two secrets of his great happiness were, his
great love for God’s Word, and his ever maintaining a good conscience,
not knowingly doing anything against the will of God. In giving
himself to the teaching of the Holy Spirit, as he tells us in his
birthday address, he made a full surrender of the entire heart to God,
to be ruled by the Word. He gave himself to obey that Word in
everything, he believed that the Holy Spirit gave the grace to obey,
and so he was able to maintain a walk free from knowingly
transgressing God’s law. This is a point he always insisted on. So he
writes, in regard to a life of dependence upon God: “It will not
do–it is not possible–to live in sin, and at the same time, by
communion with God, to draw down from heaven everything one needs for
the life that now is.” Again, speaking of the strengthening of faith:
“It is of the utmost importance that we seek to maintain an upright
heart and a good conscience, and therefore do not knowingly and
habitually indulge in those things which are contrary to the mind of
God. All my confidence in God, all my leaning upon Him in the hour of
trial, will be gone if I have a guilty conscience, and do not seek to
put away this guilty conscience, but still continue to do things which
are contrary to His mind.”
A careful perusal of this testimony will show us how the chief points
usually insisted upon in connection with the second blessing are all
found here. There is the full surrender of the heart to be taught and
led alone by the Spirit of God. There is the higher standard of
holiness which is at once set up. There is the tender desire in
nothing to offend God, but to have at all times a good conscience,
that testifies that we are pleasing to God. And there is the faith
that where the Holy Spirit reveals to us in the Word the will of God,
He gives the sufficient strength for the doing of it. “The particular
difference,” he says of reading with faith of the Holy Spirit’s
teaching, “was that I received real strength in my soul in doing so.”
No wonder that he said: The change was so great, that it was like a
second conversion.
All centres in this, that we believe in the New Covenant and its
promises as a ministration of the Spirit. That belief may come to some
suddenly, as to George Muller ; or it may dawn upon others by degrees.
Let all say to God that they are ready to put their whole heart and
life under the rule of the Holy Spirit dwelling in them, teaching them
by the Word, and strengthening them by His grace. He enables us to
live pleasing to God.
_________________________________________________________________
NOTE D.–CHAP. X
Canon Battersby
I do not know that I can find a better case by which to illustrate the
place Christ, the Mediator of the Covenant, takes in leading into its
full blessing than that of the founder of the Keswick Convention, the
late Canon Battersby.
It was at the Oxford Convention in 1873 that he witnessed to having
“received a new and distinct blessing to which he had been a stranger
before.” For more than twenty-five years he had been most diligent as
a minister of the gospel, and, as appears from his journals, most
faithful in seeking to maintain a close walk with God. But he was ever
disturbed by the consciousness of being overcome by sin. So far back
as 1853 he had written, “I feel again how very far I am from enjoying
habitually that peace and love and joy which Christ promises. I must
confess that I have it not; and that very ungentle and unchristian
tempers often strive within me for the mastery.” When in 1873 he read
what was being published of the Higher Life, the effect was to render
him utterly dissatisfied with himself and his state. There were indeed
difficulties he could not quite understand in that teaching, but he
felt that he must either reach forward to better things, nothing less
than redemption from all iniquities, or fall back more and more into
worldliness and sin. At Oxford he heard an address on the rest of
faith. It opened his eyes to the truth that a believer who really
longs for deliverance from sinning must simply take Christ at His
word, and reckon, without feeling, on Him to do His work of cleansing
and keeping the soul. “I thought of the sufficiency of Jesus, and
said, I will rest in Him, and I did rest in Him. I was afraid lest it
should be a passing emotion; but I found that a presence of Jesus was
graciously manifested to me in a way I knew not before, and that I did
abide in Him. I do not want to rest in these emotions, but just to
believe, and to cling to Christ as my all.” He was a man of very
reserved nature, but felt it a duty ere the close of the Conference to
confess publicly his past shortcoming, and testify openly to his
having entered upon a new and definite experience.
In a paper written not long after this he pointed out what the steps
are leading to this experience. First, a clear view of the
possibilities of Christian attainment–a life in word and action,
habitually governed by the Spirit, in constant communion with God, and
continual victory over sin through abiding in Christ. Then, the
deliberate purpose of the will for a full renunciation of all the
idols of the flesh or spirit, and a will-surrender to Christ. And then
this last and important step: We must look up to, and wait upon our
ascended Lord for all that we need to enable us to do this.
A careful perusal of this very brief statement will prove how
everything centred here in Christ. The surrender for a life of
continual communion and victory is to be to Christ. The strength for
that life is to be in Him and from Him, by faith in Him. And the power
to make the full surrender and rest in Him was to be waited for from
Him alone.
In June 1875 the first Keswick Convention was held. In the circular
calling it, we read : “Many are everywhere thirsting that they may be
brought to enjoy more of the Divine presence in their daily life, and
a fuller manifestation of the Holy Spirit’s power, whether in subduing
the lusts of the flesh, or in enabling them to offer more effective
service to God. It is certainly God’s will that His children should be
satisfied in regard to these longings, and there are those who can
testify that He has satisfied them, and does satisfy them with daily
fresh manifestations of His grace and power.” The results of the very
first Convention were most blessed, so that after its close he wrote:
“There is a very remarkable resemblance in the testimonies I have
since received as to the nature of the blessing obtained, viz., the
ability given to make a full surrender to the Lord, and the cousequent
experience of an abiding peace, far exceeding anything previously
experienced.” Through all the chief thought, was Christ, first drawing
and enabling the soul to rest in Him, and then meeting it with the
fulfilment of its desire, the abiding experience of His power to keep
it in victory over sin, and communion with God.
And what was the fruit of this new experience? Eight years later Canon
Battersby spoke; “It is now eight years since that I knew this
blessing as my own. I cannot say that I have never for a moment ceased
to trust the Lord to keep me. But I can say that so long as I have
trusted Him, He has kept me; He has been faithful.”
_________________________________________________________________
NOTE E.–CHAP. VIII
Nothing of Myself
ONE would think that no words could make it plainer than the words of
the Covenant state it–that the one difference between Old and New is,
that in the latter everything is to be done by God Himself. And yet
believers and even teachers do not take it in. And even those who do,
find it hard to live it out. Our whole being is so blinded to the true
relation to God, His inconceivable Omnipresent Omnipotence working
every moment in us is so far beyond the reach of human conception, our
little hearts cannot rise to the reality of His Infinite Love making
itself one with us, and delighting to dwell in us, and to work all in
us that has to be done there–that, when we think we have accepted the
truth, we find it is only a thought. We are such strangers to the
knowledge of what a GOD really is, as the actual life by which His
creatures live. In Him we live and move and have our being. And
specially is the knowledge of the Triune God too high for us, in that
wonderful, most real, and most practical indwelling, to make which
possible the Son became Incarnate, and the Holy Spirit was sent forth
into our hearts. Only they who confess their ignorance, and wait very
humbly and persistently on our Blessed God to teach us by His Holy
Spirit what that all-working indwelling is, can hope to have it
revealed to them.
It is not long since I had occasion, in preparing a series of Bible
Lessons for our Students Association here, to make a study of the
Gospel of St. John, and of the life of our Lord as set forth there. I
cannot say how deeply I have been afresh impressed with that which I
cannot but regard as the deepest secret of His life on earth, His
dependence on the Father. It has come to me like a new revelation.
Some twelve times and more He uses the word not and nothing of
Himself. Not My will. Not My words. Not My honour. Not Mine own glory.
I can do nothing of Myself. I speak not of Myself. I came not of
Myself. I do nothing of Myself.
Just think a moment what this means in connection with what He tells
us of His life in the Father. “As the Father hath life in Himself, so
He hath given to the Son to have life in Himself” (v. 26). “That all
men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father” (v. 23).
And yet this Son, who hath life in Himself even as the Father has,
immediately adds (v. 30): “I can of mine own self do nothing.” We
should have thought that with this life in Himself He would have the
power of independent action as the Father has. But no. “The Son can do
nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father do.” The chief mark
of this Divine life He has in Himself is evidently unceasing
dependence, receiving from the Father, by the moment, what He bad to
speak or do. Nothing of Myself is manifestly as true of Him as it ever
could be of the weakest or most sinful man. The life of the Father
dwelling in Christ, and Christ in the Father, meant that just as truly
as when He was begotten of the Father, He received Divine life and
glory from Him, so the continuation of that life came only by an
eternal process of giving and receiving, as absolute as is the eternal
generation itself. The more closely we study this trutb, and Christ’s
life in the light of it, the more we are compelled to say, the deepest
root of Christ’s relationship to the Father, the true reason why He
was so well-pleasing, the secret of His glorifying the Father, was
this: He allowed God to do all in Him. He only received and wrought
out what God wrought in Him. His whole attitude was that of the open
ear, the servant spirit, the childlike dependence that waited for all
on God.
The infinite importance of this truth in the Christian life is easily
felt. The life Christ lived in the Father is the life He imparts to
us. We are to abide in Him and He in us, even as He in the Father and
the Father in Him. And if the secret of His abiding in the Father be
this unceasing self-abnegation–“I can do nothing of Myself”–this
life of most entire and absolute dependence and waiting upon God, must
it not far more be the most marked feature of our Christian life, the
first and all-pervading disposition we seek to maintain? In a little
book of William Law’s, that has just been issued, [10] he specially
insists upon this in his so striking repetition of the call, if we
would die to self in order to have the birth of Divine love in our
souls, to sink down in humility, meekness, patience, and resignation
to God. I think that no one who at all enters into this advice, but
will feel what new point is given to it by the remembrance of how this
entire self-renunciation was not only one of the many virtues in the
character of Christ, but, indeed, that first essential one without
which God could have wrought nothing in Him, through which God did
work all.
Let us make Christ’s words our own: “I can do nothing of Myself.” Take
it as the keynote of a single day. Look up and see the Infinite God
waiting to do everything as soon as we are ready to give up all to
Him, and receive all from Him. Bow down in lowly worship, and wait for
the Holy Spirit to work some measure of the mind of Christ in you. Do
not be disconcerted if you do not learn the lesson at once: there is
the God of love waiting to do everything in him who is willing to be
nothing. At moments the teaching appears dangerous, at other times
terribly difficult. The Blessed Son of God teaches it us–this was His
whole life: I can do nothing of Myself. He is our life; He will work
it in us. And when as the Lamb of God He begets this His disposition
in us, we shall be prepared for Him to rise on us and shine in us in
His heavenly glory.
“Nothing of Myself”–that word spoken eighteen hundred years ago,
coming out of the inmost depths of the heart of the Son of God–is a
seed in which the power of the eternal life is hidden. Take it
straight from the heart of Christ, and hide it in your heart. Meditate
on it till it reveals the beauty of His Divine meekness and humility,
and explains how all the power and glory of God could work in Him.
Believe in it as containing the very life and disposition which you
need, and believe in Christ, whose Spirit dwells in the seed to make
it true in you. Begin, in single acts of self-emptying, to offer it to
God as the one desire of your heart. Count upon God accepting them,
and meeting them with His grace, to make the acts into habits, and the
habits into dispositions. And you may depend upon it, there is nothing
that will lift you so near to God, nothing that will unite you closer
to Christ, nothing that will prepare you for the abiding presence and
power of God working in you, as the death to self which is found in
the simple word–NOTHING OF MYSELF.
This word is one of the keys to the New Covenant Life. As I believe
that God is actually to work all in me, I shall see that the one thing
that is hindering me is, my doing something of myself. As I am willing
to learn from Christ by the Holy Spirit to say truly, Nothing of
myself, I shall have the true preparation to receive all God has
engaged to work, and the power confidently to expect it. I shall learn
that the whole secret of the New Covenant is just one thing: GOD WORKS
ALL! The seal of the Covenant stands sure: “I the Lord have spoken it,
AND I WILL DO IT.”
_________________________________________________________________
[10] Dying to Self: A Golden Dialogue. by William Law. With Notes. The
thought is worked out with exceeding power, and the lesson taught that
the only thing man can do for his salvation is to deny and cease from
himself, that God may work in him.
_________________________________________________________________
NOTE F.–CHAP. XVIII
The Whole Heart
LET me give the principal passages in which the words “the whole
heart,” “all the heart,” are used. A careful study of them will show
how wholehearted love and service is what God has always asked,
because He can, in the very nature of things, ask nothing less. The
prayerful and believing acceptance of the words will waken the
assurance that such wholehearted love and service is exactly the
blessing the New Covenant was meant to make possible. That assurance
will prepare us for turning to the Omnipotence of God to work in us
what may have hitherto appeared beyond our reach.
Hear, first, God’s word in Deuteronomy–
iv. 29: “If thou seek the Lord thy God, thou shalt find Him, if thou
seek Him with all thy heart and all thy soul.”
vi. 4, 5: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord; and thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul,
and with all thy might.”
x. 12: “What doth the Lord thy God require of thee but to fear the
Lord thy God, to walk in all His ways, and to love Him, and to serve
Him with all thy heart and all thy soul.”
xi. 13: “Hearken diligently unto My commandments, to love the Lord
your God, and to serve Him with all your heart and all your soul.”
xiii. 3: “The Lord your God proveth you, whether ye love the Lord your
God with all your heart and all your soul.”
xxvi. 16 : “Thou shalt therefore keep these statutes and do them with
all thy heart and all thy soul.”
xxx. 2: “Thou shalt obey His voice with all thine heart and with all
soul.”
xxx. 6: “The Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart, to love the
Lord thy God with all thine heart and with all thy soul” (see also v.
9, 10).
Take these oft-repeated words as the expression of God’s will
concerning His people, and concerning yourself; ask if you could wish
to give God anything less. Take the last-cited verse as the Divine
promise of the New Covenant–that He will circumcise, will so cleanse
the heart to love Him with a wholehearted love, that obedience is
within your reach; and say whether you will not vow afresh to keep
this His first and great commandment.
Listen to Joshua (xxii. 5): “Take diligent heed to love the Lord your
God, and to walk in all His ways, and to keep His commandments, and to
cleave unto Him, and to serve Him, with all your heart and with all
your soul.”
Listen to Samuel (1 Sam. xii. 20, 24): “Turn not aside from following
the Lord, but serve the Lord with all your heart. Only fear the Lord,
and serve Him in truth with all your heart.”
Hear David repeating God’s promise to Solomon (1 Kings ii. 4) “If thy
children take heed to their way, to walk before Me in truth with all
their heart and all their soul.”
Hear God’s word concerning David (1 Kings xiv. 8): “My servant David,
who followed Me with all his heart, to do that only which was right in
Mine eyes.”
Hear Solomon in his temple prayer (1 Kings viii. 48): “If they return
to Thee with all their heart and all their soul, hear Thou their
prayer.”
Listen to what is said of Jehu (2 Kings x. 31): “The Lord said unto
Jehu, Thou hast done well in executing that which is right in Mine
eyes. But Jehu took no heed to walk in the law of the Lord with all
his heart.”
Of Josiah we read (2 Kings xxiii. 3, 25): “The king and all the men of
Judah made a covenant with the Lord, to walk after the Lord, with all
their heart and with all their soul, to perform the words of this
covenant that were written in this book. There was no king like him,
that turned to the Lord with all his heart, and all his soul, and all
his might.”
The words concerning Asa, in 2 Chron. xv. 12, 15, we had as our text.
Of Jehoshaphat, men said (2 Chron. xxii. 9): “He sought the Lord with
all his heart.”
And of Hezekiah it is written (2 Chron. xxxi. 21) : “In every work
that he began, to seek his God, he did it with all his heart and
prospered.”
Oh that all would ask God to give them, by the Holy Spirit, a simple
vision of Himself!–claiming, giving, accepting, blessing, delighting
in, the love and service of the whole heart–the sacrifice of the
whole burnt-offering. Surely they would fall down and join the ranks
of those who have given it; and refuse to think of anything as
religious life, or worship, or service, but that in which their whole
heart went out to God. Turn to the Psalms. Hear David (ix. 1, cxi. 1,
cxxxviii. 1): “I will praise Thee with my whole heart.” And in Psalm
cxix., the Psalm of the way of blessedness: “Blessed who seek Him with
the whole heart. With my whole heart have I sought Thee. I shall keep
Thy law, yea I shall observe it with my whole heart. I entreated Thy
favour with my whole heart. I will keep Thy precepts with my whole
heart. I cried with my whole heart.” Praise and prayer; seeking God
and keeping His precepts; all equally with the whole heart.
Shall we not begin asking more earnestly than ever, as often as we see
men engaged in their earthly pursuits in search of money, or pleasure,
or fame, or power, with their whole heart. Is this the spirit in which
Christians consider that God must be served? Is this the spirit in
which I serve Him? Is not this the one thing needful in our religion?
Lord, reveal unto us Thy will!
Now, just a few words more from the Prophets about the new time, the
great change that can come into our lives.
Jer. xxiv. 7 : “I will give them an heart to know Me that I am the
Lord; and they shall be My people and I will be their God; for they
shall return to Me with their whole heart.”
xxix. 13: ” Ye shall seek Me, and find Me, when ye shall search for Me
with all your heart. And I will be found of you, saith the Lord.”
xxxii. 39-41.–Let my reader not be weary of reading carefully these
Divine words: they contain the secret, the seed, the living power of a
complete transition out of a life in the bondage of half-hearted
service, to the glorious liberty of the children of God.–“I will give
them one heart, that they may fear Me for ever. And I will make an
everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn away from them to
do them good ; but I will put my fear in their heart, that they shall
not depart from Me. Yea, I will rejoice over them to do them good,
with My whole heart and My whole Soul!”
It is to be all God’s doing. And He is to do it with His whole heart
and His whole soul. It is the vision of this God with His whole heart
loving us, longing and delighting to fulfil His promise, and make us
wholly His own, that we need. This vision makes it impossible not to
love Him with our whole heart. Lord, open our eyes that we may see!
Joel ii. 12: “Therefore also now, saith the Lord, turn ye even to Me
with all your heart.”
Zeph. iii. 14: “Shout, O Israel; BE GLAD AND REJOICE WITH ALL THE
HEART; The Lord hath taken away thy judgments. HE HATH CAST OUT THINE
ENEMY; THE KING OF ISRAEL, THE LORD, IS IN THE MIDST OF THEE; THOU
SHALT NOT SEE EVIL ANY MORE.”
Now one word from our Lord Jesus (Matt. xxii. 37): “Jesus said, Thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart.” This is the first and
great commandment. This is the sum of that law He came to fulfil for
us and in us, came to enable us to fulfil. “For what the law could not
do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending His own Son,
condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of the law might be
fulfilled in us who walk after the Spirit.”
Praise God! this righteousness of the law–loving God with all the
heart, for love is the fulfilling of the law–this righteousness of
the law is fulfilled in us, who walk after the Spirit. Jesus came to
make it possible. He gives His Spirit–the Spirit of life in Christ
Jesus–to make it actual. Let us not fear to give ourselves a whole
burnt offering, acceptable to God; loving Him with all our heart and
mind and strength.
May I ask the reader just once again to peruse Chapter VI., on “The
Everlasting Covenant,” and Chapter XVIII., on “Entering into the
Covenant with the Whole Heart.” And say then, if you have never yet
entered fully into this covenant of the whole heart, whether you are
not ready to do it now. God demands, God works, God is, oh, so
infinitely worthy of, the whole heart! Fear not to say He shall have
it. You may confidently count upon the blessed Lord Jesus, the Surety
of the Covenant, whose it is to make it true in you by His Spirit, to
enable you to exercise the faith that knows that God’s power will work
what He has promised. In His Name say: With my whole heart I do love
Thee!
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
Indexes
_________________________________________________________________
Index of Scripture References
Exodus
[1]32:26-29
Numbers
[2]25:10-13
Deuteronomy
[3]4:1 [4]5:29 [5]7:9 [6]30:6 [7]30:6 [8]33:5-11 [9]33:10
1 Samuel
[10]12:20 [11]12:24
1 Kings
[12]2:4 [13]8:48 [14]14:8
2 Kings
[15]10:31 [16]23:3 [17]23:3 [18]23:25
2 Chronicles
[19]15:12 [20]15:12 [21]22:9 [22]31:21
Psalms
[23]19
Isaiah
[24]6:2 [25]10:17 [26]12:6
Jeremiah
[27]7:23 [28]24:7 [29]24:7 [30]24:7 [31]31 [32]31:32
[33]32:40
Ezekiel
[34]34:25 [35]36:27 [36]37:26
Joel
[37]2:12
Zephaniah
[38]3:14
Malachi
[39]2:6
Matthew
[40]22:37
Luke
[41]1:68-75
Romans
[42]1:7 [43]6
1 Corinthians
[44]1:2 [45]2 [46]2
2 Corinthians
[47]3 [48]3 [49]3:7 [50]3:10-12
Galatians
[51]3:10 [52]3:21
1 Thessalonians
[53]3:13
Hebrews
[54]8 [55]9:15 [56]9:16
Revelation
[57]1:5 [58]4:8
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Index of Pages of the Print Edition
[59]iii [60]iv [61]v [62]vii [63]viii [64]ix [65]x [66]1
[67]2 [68]3 [69]4 [70]5 [71]6 [72]7 [73]8 [74]9 [75]10
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[247]182 [248]183 [249]184 [250]185 [251]186 [252]187 [253]188
[254]189 [255]190
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This document is from the Christian Classics Ethereal
Library at Calvin College, http://www.ccel.org,
generated on demand from ThML source.
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251. file://localhost/ccel/m/murray/covenants/cache/covenants.html3#iii.xxiii-Page_186
252. file://localhost/ccel/m/murray/covenants/cache/covenants.html3#iii.xxiv-Page_187
253. file://localhost/ccel/m/murray/covenants/cache/covenants.html3#iii.xxiv-Page_188
254. file://localhost/ccel/m/murray/covenants/cache/covenants.html3#iii.xxiv-Page_189
255. file://localhost/ccel/m/murray/covenants/cache/covenants.html3#iii.xxiv-Page_190