ASSOCIATED WITH CHRIST IN HEAVEN SO AS TO BE FREE UPON EARTH
[p. 97] ASSOCIATED WITH CHRIST IN HEAVEN SO AS TO BE FREE UPON EARTH
The Lord Jesus is not now on earth. He has ascended up into heaven. What a very peculiar position then is mine here! Sensible of the worthlessness of the first man, and of the absence of the Second. My own life - that of the first man - I hate; the One I love - the Man who has glorified God upon the earth - I find no longer here. How can I get on? Only as united to that One in glory. He is my life. Once with Him I can walk here, not to cultivate my own life, but to manifest His, which is mine in Him. Thus the Lord says, “for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth”. His sanctification as expressed in those words is positional. He has ascended up into glory, and is wholly apart from this scene, that we might by the Holy Spirit be associated with Him there, and this is our moral sanctification. But how am I led into this association? See Acts 7: 55. Stephen, “being full of the Holy Spirit, having fixed his eyes on heaven, he saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God”. Now there was a new and distinct action of the Holy Spirit, enabling Stephen’s soul to penetrate through everything, and to find Jesus where He is, even in the glory of God. It was a new thing brought out at that moment. It was, in a sense, contrary to Stephen’s own preaching, for he had been preaching that Christ was to come down - to return. In chapter 1 the disciples were distinctly told not to gaze up into heaven, but now Christ’s rejection was completed, and there was no longer any present possibility of His return to earth to take His rights, and the Holy Spirit takes a new line of action. He finds Jesus in the glory [p. 98] for the saint, and links the soul of the saint with Him there, all hope for the earth being cut off. For Stephen, it was the preparation for his own dissolution, and raised him completely superior to all the tribulation of the scene here. Rivetted to that scene, linked with the One whom he saw there, he has only to bear his simple testimony, and to pray for his murderers - grand testimony to the mighty power of Christ, thus placing His disciple above all the misery here.
Now every new revelation determines the character of the action of the Holy Spirit during any given period. When everything has failed on earth, He directs me to where there is no failure, He turns my eye to heaven. He accomplishes in me the very same action that He did in Stephen.
In 2 Kings 2: 11, 12, we get an illustration of the very same thing, that is to say, of the way in which the Holy Spirit leads the soul of the believer now, turning the eye upwards. Elisha asks for a double portion of Elijah’s spirit. The answer he gets is, “Thou hast asked a hard thing: nevertheless, if thou see me when I am taken from thee, it shall be so unto thee; but if not, it shall not be so”. Do you not think Elisha kept his eye fixed upon his master after this intimation? Gazing on the one who went up, the one who remains gets a double portion of his spirit. And what is his first action? He rends his own clothes; he has done with himself; he has the mantle of the one who has gone up, and in the power of that he can walk through the scene here. “Have your mind on the things that are above, not on the things that are on the earth; for ye have died, and your life is hid with the Christ in God”. It is the strangest of all anomalies that we should be left here to live, where our life is not. Tell me where your eye is, and I will tell you what your conduct is. We all, with unveiled face beholding the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Lord [p. 99] the Spirit. There we get the moral consequence. One spirit with that Lord, the glory claims me as its own. It must, for when I am in company with Christ, I am in the very same order of things as Himself. Moses had to veil his face, but now, on the contrary, I can behold the glory of the Lord with unveiled face, and be transformed thereby into the same image. I have no shrinking from the glory, my heart rests in it. I can look up into that glory as one with the blessed One who is there, and who has made for me a free entrance into it by the ministration of righteousness and of the Spirit.
John 14 gives us the normal state of the saint now; the Spirit of truth is given to comfort us during the absence of Christ. But is that all? No, the Lord says, “At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you”. Aye, “know.” How wonderful! It is “that day”, the Spirit’s day, that we are now in, the day of the distinct and peculiar action of the Holy Spirit.
If I am not in conscious union with the One who is there, I cannot ‘hate’ the life that is here. I must be in His life in order to turn from my own. He has ended the first man in His cross where He met every claim of God’s righteousness, and endured God’s righteous and terrible judgment, and having exhausted it, having borne the whole penalty of sin, He declares the name of the One whom He glorified when bearing the judgment to the uttermost. In resurrection He declares the Father’s name: “I will declare thy name unto my brethren, in the midst of the church will I sing praise unto thee”. We are freed from the judgment which He bore and, in the life of the blessed One who has borne it, we can sing praises with Him.