THE LORD'S ABSENCE
THE LORD’S ABSENCE
Our Lord’s words to us in these chapters, from 13 to the end of 17, have a very peculiar interest for us. They unfold to us how He compensates His loved ones for His absence, and during His absence. It is especially and entirely what He is to us where we are, but where He is not. It refers exclusively to the present time, and not to the future.
It is distinctly what I am to know of Him during His absence. The first and simple thing for us to lay hold of is His thought, and the scope of it with regard to us. We must first see the measure or the boundlessness of it, and then judge ourselves by it.
What we do ordinarily is the reverse. We measure His thought by our own experience of it, we admit its scope just in so far as we have proved it, instead of saying, There is His thought written down for me, as it is in His heart, and though I do not come up to it, I never can allow myself to be less than it. It judges me, and I do not reduce or qualify it to my own state.
The tendency with us is to accept as much of a truth as one enjoys, or as one thinks suits one; hence as a rule souls do not go further than Philip, that is, in heart and in practice saying, “Shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us”; let us but know the omnipotent shelter and care of the Father and we are satisfied. Christ’s absence, the dearth and difficulty of this scene are overlooked, provided the heart has rest in the assurance of the Father’s care. It is going no further than the babes (1 John 2), they know the Father, but they are babes, strength is not used; they are taught their strength; 1 John 2: 18 - 27. The young men use their strength; the third class walk as in Christ, fulfilling His pleasure.
[p. 135] It is a great thing and most blessed to be as a babe knowing the Father, but it is not the fullest thing, and we have to guard against the tendency to content ourselves with that amount of blessing which relieves our misery, instead of pressing on to comprehend the mind and purpose of our God about us. A babe has to be taught its strength, the need and the good of it (see 1 John 2: 27); though he is happy in knowing the Father, though he feels himself in the mighty paternity of God’s eternal love, he is not to stop there; great as it is, he is to use his strength, to be strong, to overcome the wicked one, and not only this, but to walk in Christ, which is the scope of the purpose of God’s heart for us.
You lose nothing of the babe’s enjoyment because you are strong, and you forfeit none of your strength when you walk even as He walked; on the contrary, the more you come up to the summit of His counsel and the accomplishment of it for you, the more intensely does your soul realise every step that led thereto. The highest level imparts additional virtue to each lower one. In the lower level I am not quite out of my own personality, and not quite in the personality of Christ, which is the simplest intention and force of those words of consolation in John 14. As a babe I am enjoying my position; as a young man I am occupied with the strength vouchsafed to me; but when in Christ and He in me I have lost my own personality and my life is not only mine, but it is “not I, but Christ liveth in me”. This is quite a peculiar and superior thing altogether. I am now conscious not only of living by Him, His life is my life, but by the Holy Spirit I “know”, as He says, “that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you”. What knowledge for such as we are down here! What a place of strength and joy to occupy, amid the ruin and dreariness of this evil scene, during the absence of our Lord!
[p. 136] Flesh and blood lose their demand and control when we are in the power of this - “all that a man hath will he give for his life”. Flesh and blood is not our life. Paul says, “immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood”. Why? Because “it pleased God... to reveal his Son in me”. The Lord teach us to see His own thought and purpose for us, and to accept nothing short of it, as that which can alone support and solace us in the evil and difficulty of this world during His absence.