1879 307 There are in this chapter various aspects of the truth and grace of God in Christ, connected with the place of government in which we stand related to our God and Father.
First, there is the one hope that grace has given to us. And there is nothing, to my mind, more remarkable throughout such wondrous words than this, that our Lord Jesus gives us credit for the highest motives and for the best affections. This is the more touching when we remember that He was just about to die by the wicked hands of men; and we can only understand it by reminding ourselves that we are now invariably addressed according to a nature that is of God; and if we are made partakers of the divine nature, if we have Christ's life as our life, how can it be anything but that which answers to God? The life that is in the Christian in no wise differs in its character from that life which is seen in its perfection in Christ. It differs in its manifestation, it differs in its measure of action, but it is one and the same life, and can be none other. Just as the old nature that we had does not differ in its character from Adam after he fell, but shows the same distrust of God, the same love of its own way, the same tendency to tax evil on God Himself, to throw the blame on wife or anybody in order to excuse self. Such is the life that was manifested in the first man directly he fell. We have, of course, only touched upon some of the leading points that we find in Genesis 3, and yet we all feel how applicable every point is to the children, as the Holy Ghost has described it, of our common father. No otherwise is it with the life that we now have in Christ; Christ Himself is its divinely manifested perfection; but Christ is the life of the feeblest soul that belongs to Him, and nothing strengthens that life more than the calm and peaceful consciousness of the believer that it is the same life, while looking to Him as an object. What immense joy and comfort to think that our life is not merely immortal being! Angels, of course, have an existence that never terminates, even as the human soul does not; but ours is the very life of Christ Himself. He is our life, and that now, even in this world. Hence, first of all, we find that the hope is of the very highest character, suited to such as know Christ as the way, the truth, and the life. It is a hope according to Christ, not a hope of seeing this world completely changed, of the Jews delivered from their unbelief and their degradation, and the Gentiles from all their restless, self-vaunting, godless plans, in which the first man magnifies himself, as if there were no second Man, nor His cross, nor His coming again; nor is it even the triumph over Satan put down and the curse removed.
All these things belong to the first creation, and to God's dealings with the creature, and will be displayed on the earth. But. Christ does not belong to the earth. Although He was pleased to descend from heaven, and to be a man on earth, yet we know that he who sees no more than a man in Christ, however glorious, knows nothing at all of God. What gives the essence of the truth as to Christ is not even His being glorified as Man in heaven merely. He is God, the Word, the Son, who was pleased to take up manhood into union with His eternal person, and to bring us by redemption into a place with Himself, and to he like Himself, glorified in the presence of God. This then is the hope given to us. The Son of God, who is known by the Father as no creature ever did, or could, know Him (Matt. 11), came to glorify God as man in the place of sin and for sin (John 13), and then in divine grace, when cleansed every whit by water and blood, to give us a place with Himself in the Father's house. We are to be with the Son, according to divine counsel and His love, in the presence of the Father. Hence it is He speaks here at first exclusively of what is in heaven, and of the highest and nearest place there, for there is much in the heavenly places that is not the Father's house. Angels are never said to be in the Father's house, nor any created beings, save those who have the Son as their life, as well as accomplished redemption.
But as is our hope, so also is our life; and inasmuch as in us there is a counter-power, while Satan acts as by the world, an old nature that would drag us down into the defilements of the world and of the flesh, we need not only life, but power. Life is not power. Romans 7 shows us clearly the difference. We have there a person undoubtedly possessed of life, but without power. The good that he wishes, he does not; the evil that he hates, that he does. Thus does a distressing struggle go on; but for all that it is a soul born of God, a new nature that loves God and hates evil, but powerless and wretched. If it had not been one born again, he would not know any such struggle. The first man loves what is evil, and hates what is good; but in Romans 7 it is a real genuine desire after God and detestation of sin in the soul, yet withal no power. It is a converted soul that earnestly strives to avoid evil and do what is good, grasping after promises to lift it out of its state. This is the condition of many children of God at the present time. They are born of God, but there is no power, because there is no submission practically to take the place of death with Christ to sin. It is a believer, but taking the unbelieving way of striving to conquer sin, instead of death with Christ. Now we must be broken down, in order to give self absolutely up, we must be made willing to accept the truth of our state, to feel, not our sinfulness only, but our utter weakness, before the power of Christ can rest upon us.
And this is the secret why so many believers abide in bondage for a long while. They are striving to do right, and have not yet submitted to God's righteousness, to His sentence on the old man. They have been brought to own their guilt, but not their powerlessness, and it is one thing to feel that I am a guilty sinner, and another that I am lost, without power for God at all, and till I am broken down to be content only with Christ for everything, for power as well as for life and pardon, I shall always be in a see-saw state of sometimes happy, sometimes miserable, of sometimes hoping, and sometimes fearing or troubled. But this is not the proper condition of a Christian. I do not say that true believers may not be in that condition; but we must make a difference between the state in which a believer may be, and the true christian state. A real child of God may for a while, and even long, be in a state that is anything but christian. The proper christian knowledge is that I died with Christ, yet that I live in Him, and that not only life is in Christ, but power is of the Holy Spirit through Him. I own the good-for-nothingness of the first man when I am brought down as dead with Christ, to receive the Holy Ghost as alone power. If the Lord were to give no power, privately or otherwise, we should claim the merit of it to ourselves. If we were striving after what is good, and had power to accomplish it, would we not magnify ourselves? There is no soul of man but would be lifted up by it. But if I am broken down (for it is wrought experimentally though by faith) to own my complete ruin, and no way out of it but death with Christ, God's work by Him, no less than His free gift is the new life that He has given us in Him, then the Spirit of God can strengthen us, and make us more than conquerors through Him that loved us.
Hence, in this chapter, after the full bright hope according to Christ, the next thing is the Holy Spirit given to the saints. What was Christ's condition here below? Was He ever in this miserable state? There have been saints blinded enough to say so. You will find this kind of doctrine among theologians, but a Christian must be under the dead weight of much rubbish who could allow such thoughts of the Lord Jesus. For nothing can be plainer in the Gospels, nothing more consistent with His person, than that He never had one moment's interruption of perfect communion with His Father, till He went under the load of our sins on the cross: even then it was not that the Father did not find His perfect complacency in the Son. It is not too much to affirm that at this solemn moment He was more than ever the object of God the Father's delight, but there could not be, if He was really bearing sin and suffering for it from God, the interchange of communion then. That had always been before, but the bearing of our sins involved God's forsaking Him. If the sins He bore were real, God's judgment of them in the cross was no less real too; and it would have been mockery, if, when He was suffering the judgment of God on sin, the interchange of communion had gone on all the same. So far from the holiness of Christ making the cross to be less terrible, so far from His love making the judgment of sin light, all that He is made Christ's sufferings incomparably greater.
Again, so far was the glory of His person from detracting from His sufferings, that it deepened immeasurably what none other could have endured. There was in Him infinite capacity of feeling and of endurance, every element that could add to, none that could take from, His sufferings. And as this was the perfect suffering of the Lord Jesus for sin, and our sins, to God's glory, so perfect is the peace that results. The redemption is as everlasting as the life. If He is yours, you live before God in the life in which Christ lives Himself — not only the perfect life which He had as man in this world, but the life of One who was dead and lives for evermore, having already borne our sins. Hence the life in Him risen I now have is the witness that my sins are gone; and God gives me the Holy Ghost that I may enjoy and grow up into Him in all things by grace. Christ, when bearing the judgment of sin, did know, as none but He could, the sense of judgment, instead of the enjoyment of communion, but therefore are we called to perfect peace. Judgment was what He went through in order that we should never know it; not that the Lord would not have our consciences to judge ourselves thoroughly; but we are never able to judge evil rightly till we rest in peace on the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
John does not so much take up redemption. It is life in Christ that is his characteristic subject. We find in Paul redemption as well as life, and in John it is not that redemption is absent, but nevertheless life is his chief point, and, along with that, the Holy Ghost. What is the blessed place of the Holy Ghost looked at here? Christ was going away; the Holy Ghost is given to abide in and with them for ever as the Paraclete. It is not only power, or gift, it is the Holy Ghost Himself given as He never was, nor could be, before; it was an abiding of the Holy Ghost that could not be till Jesus was glorified, and had gone away. It was the Holy Ghost given to be enjoyed by believers on the earth as no man, nor even believers, had the Holy Ghost before. They had had the Holy Ghost in other ways, sweet and precious; but the Holy Ghost was to be given personally, and abide as He had only on the Son of man, whom God the Father had sealed. Why was this? Because the possession of the Holy Ghost was to be according to Christ, as the hope was. The Lord Jesus, when He was on earth, had the Spirit of God dwelling in Him as no one ever had before; He was the only one who could say that He was a temple of God. The truth is, God will never lower redemption to the thoughts of men, and therefore God gives special honour when redemption is an accomplished fact, but not before; and we are the objects of this wonderful grace, not we only, God forbid; but every real christian person now, everyone that has submitted to the righteousness of God, every believer united by the Holy Ghost to Christ, has that same blessed hope, and that same glorious and divine Person dwelling in them now. So that we can say that we are the temple of God; and if we do not know it, we are grieving the Holy Ghost by our unbelief.
All Christian walk depends really on our starting clear with this, that we have Christ as eternal life, and redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, and that the same Spirit dwells in us that dwelt in the Lord Jesus. As Jesus did nothing save by the Holy Ghost, so we, who have a nature opposed to Christ, do pre-eminently need the action of the Spirit of God to keep us walking according to God.
And this is the third point brought out for us here. Not only have we the life of Christ and the power of Christ, but we are put in the same place of obedience as the Lord Jesus. There is, however, a distinction worthy of note in what is said by the Lord Jesus here. "He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and manifest myself to him." What blessedness! It was the place of Christ. It is no less open for the Christian; and more, if possible, for the simple reason, that, while the Lord Jesus could say He was not alone, for He had the Father with Him, still, there was, and could be, nobody else; but we have the Father and the Son. Think how the disciples left Him in His sorrow, when He most of all needed their sympathy; when He had chosen out three of the best of them to be His companions, they fell asleep, and the only one that remained, Peter, the boldest of them all, stayed with Him but to curse, and to swear, and to add fresh bitter pangs to His shame. And such is the first man even in the child of God! What a precious thing, then, to have Christ Himself as the only life we live before God. And as for the other nature, it is already a wholly judged thing, put away as an unclean rag, buried out of one's sight. But then comes this place of obedience.
There are two things to notice. First, we hear of commandments — an important word. "He that hath my commandments." A person might say, this is a very hard thing, "He that hath my commandments." Why does He make having them a part of loving Him? Men would have said, He that keeps the commandments that are given to him. But no, it is, "he that hath;" because love is sure to have them. If there is not love at work, you will not have them, you cannot see them, you do not know them, you are ever asking, Show me a text for this, and a passage for that. Why do people ask this? Because they have not got the loving eye that understands it already. When there is no love, or the will is at work, we do not see clearly, we find excuses and ply reasons; and it is not at all hard to find a good reason for a bad thing. Any person of some amount of cleverness or a strong will can do that; but what pleases Christ and what He says is this, "He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me." What is it that gives us to have His commandments? The loving heart that treasures every wish He utters, that does not count His commandments grievous, but rather wholesome and good — such an one has His commandments always. There is no hurrying to get the right thing when the time for action comes. Love walks with the Lord, treasuring up every declaration of His will, and then, when the moment of trial comes, all is ready.
We see then that the Lord puts everything in its very best light, that is, in His own. As He gives us the same hope, His own place to be with Himself in the Father's house, the same life and the Holy Ghost as the power, so also He puts us in the same pathway of obedience as His own. Was not that true of Christ? If the devil came and tempted Him, He knew the right answer of God's word at the right moment. He kept the Father's commandments, and abode in His love: a sorrower, yet His joy full. Others might fumble over the leaves of a Bible to find what was wanted; for the Lord, God's law was in His heart, and He knew His commandment to be life everlasting. I say not a word against searching the Bible. It is well conscientiously to search and read; but it is a better thing to be so fed and nourished in the truth that you have the thing when it is wanted.
But then suppose we have the commandments, this is not enough. There are words that give guidance to one, where another says nothing. When Paul and Barnabas were not listened to by the Jews, they think of the word of the Lord, and Paul says that he must "turn to the Gentiles, for so hath the Lord commanded us." I doubt that any other would have seen that but Paul, and the reason was just this: his heart was with the Lord; he thinks at once of Isaiah; but the prophet is speaking of the Lord. Jehovah says to Christ, "I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the ends of the earth." But Paul and Barnabas say, Christ is our life, and if it is true of Christ, it is true of us; and if Christ, rejected by Israel, turn to the Gentiles, so should we. If one casts us out, let us take it meekly and turn to another. Where there is humble love, you turn from those that reject you, and you go where the door is open.
So the Lord goes farther still in verses 23, 24, and declares that if one love Him, he will keep His word and His Father will love Him, and we will come to him and make our abode with him; as on the other hand, he that loves Him not keeps not His words. It may not take the shape of command, but it is the expression of His mind and pleasure. This is enough for the heart that loves Christ.
The Lord give us to see the way of Christ in death to self, but the activity of His gracious power to the glory of our God and Saviour.