KEEPING SPIRITUAL THINGS
[p. 33] KEEPING SPIRITUAL THINGS
Luke 2:19,51; Genesis 37:11; 2 Timothy 1:14
These scriptures are intimately related, so that I hope I shall not find any difficulty in linking them in the ministry of the truth. They speak of things being kept — spiritual things. The basis is laid in them, I think, for the existence of Christianity without the written page. In eternity, we shall not be referring to the written page. Whatever there will be, it will not be kept in storehouses but in the intelligences and affections of persons, and this fact obviously suggests great richness in that day, and great variety and great freshness. It is difficult to place ourselves in a timeless state of things, because we are accustomed to time. We could hardly think save as in time, but God would help us to participate in a limitless state of things, and that we should be accustomed to variety — never idle or disinterested; never, as it were, looking out of the window. And these scriptures lay the basis for power to keep things — things that are worth keeping. The first three scriptures read speak of things directly connected with the Lord Jesus: first, in His babehood; the second, in His boyhood and the third, in His young manhood. They involve, therefore, grounding in the knowledge of Christ; that we acquire a knowledge of Him that remains with us. Much indeed, is forgotten, one knows, even of the best things, but the Scriptures would suggest, especially in these passages, the need of discrimination in what comes to us, and to hold certain features, as Mary would keep certain things in her mind; the word ‘mind’ being suggestive of the place where these things are kept in the organism of a person. And then you ponder them in the heart,
[p. 34] the heart being suggestive of a remarkable combination of other elements in the make-up of a being. It is in the midst, as we might say, the midst of the person; and it is fed by other features (speaking of it now as in a moral sense, though the same is true in a physical sense) so that the understanding is connected with it, and the affections sometimes chiefly connected with it. And so we can understand how Mary the mother of our Lord enters into the Scriptures in this connection — a woman of outstanding distinction, but the distinction I am seeking to bring forward is not such as is formally accorded to her. It is what she herself takes on. She is the author of it in herself, which is an important matter, for we are chiefly looking for favours and advantages through others; whereas we have great power of according advantage each of us to himself. And this is what develops in connection with Mary, the mother of our Lord. She is distinguished above women, as we all know, and she is a woman of introspective power, which every Christian should be, having the power of introspection. She says, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Saviour” (Luke 1:47). She distinguished between her soul and her spirit. Perhaps few of us have attempted to do this. It is important to distinguish introspectively so that we may discover what we are capable of, what are the departments, as it were. The ego is the head of each department and co-ordinates them, but it is important to learn the departments and the avenues to them, and not to go into the wrong one at any time, nor to operate in it.
So first of all we have in Mary, the mother of our Lord, a representative of a Christian who has very tender affections at this time — very tender; her Babe was just born. Her first babe, the Babe of babes, the Lord of glory. She was not oblivious to all this, either. One of the most important dignitaries [p. 35] in heaven had told her about the Babe — Gabriel, a very sympathetic man, a priestly angel, really. We are not wanting in such a Person, dear brethren. The Lord of glory Himself is our priestly Angel; indeed, He is spoken of as an Angel in Scripture, as a Priest. And He is especially sympathetic with us, especially young mothers, and Mary was a young mother, and she was the mother of a great Child: “the holy thing also which shall be born shall be called Son of God” (verse 35). That was told her, so that she may be taken as one who would always be sympathetic with young mothers. Of course, she became a mother in Israel. It would take more than one child to make her that, and she had a good many children; but I am speaking now of the Lord Jesus, and He was her first-born, and her affections are all young. In the midst of much that was going on, for it is a chapter of activity, first of all the political world was in great activity and all was in relation to her and her husband and above all her Child that was to be born. The whole Roman world was set in motion for that, that the Child should be born in Bethlehem; and then heaven is aglow about this matter. Shepherds were occupied with their sheep probably, all tender work, livestock, sheep, by night, and the angel of the Lord is there by them. We are not told who he was, but the glory of the Lord shone round about them. That is the religious political world was changed into a sanctuary, as we might say, such is the life of faith. And the angel unfolds the great fact to the shepherds, and presently a multitude of the heavenly host was with them; not their own host, the Jewish host, but the heavenly one. Heaven came down in volume, so to speak, so as to make itself felt as to what heaven really is when there is something going on that interests heaven, and they were saying certain things, no doubt, in language intelligible to the shepherds — “[p. 36] glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good pleasure in men” (Luke 2:14), pointing out great things for the world, great things on the earth. Well, the heavenly host returned to its place, and the shepherds went to Bethlehem and related what had happened, and Mary, we are told, kept these things in her mind — pondered them in her heart. For she had a mind, and she knew she had a mind, and she knew what it was for — to hold things that are valuable as treasure, and then to take them out to ponder them as opportunity offers. It is quite right to take a Bible and read a passage such as I am reading now, Luke 2, but it is another thing and really a greater thing morally to take the thing out of your own heart. It is there as a repository of your own, and you take it out and think over it. It is a remarkable matter; a matter to be noticed; that is to say, babehood; the babehood of the Lord Jesus and the things that attached to it. What movements there were in relation to it; heavenly movements particularly! What sayings there were! Who was absorbing them? The shepherds did anyway, although perhaps with a certain intelligence different from hers as men, and as shepherds, yet they could hardly be expected to have the same tender affections as the affections of a mother. That is what Mary had. Even Joseph could not have what she had, nor could any of the apostles have what she had; not an angel could have what she had. There is no one who could have what she had but herself, but she had it, and she knew she had it, and she placed it in the safest repository — within her, and she could take it out and go over it. What thoughts arose in her mind! She could distinguish between her soul and her spirit, as she does in her song. She would distinguish between her heart, too, and her soul, as I said. The soul is the lower affections; it is not an organ; it is a moral element. No doctor can discover [p. 37] the soul with his instruments. He can get the heart. Nor can he get to the mind. Man is a spiritual and moral being, so that she could take these wonderful things that she had there in her mind, in her repository, at any time and go over them. How that would enhance her spiritual growth, as she went over them!
Well now, that is number one. It ought to appeal to all young mothers here, young persons; for God is taking account of us in all our relations. He works in us, too, in relation to our respective ages, so that nothing should be left out in our calculations. As it says, “Run, speak to this young man” (Zechariah 2:4). Not ‘this man’ but “this young man”, so it is that we are taken account of in our circumstances in that way, in our ages; the ages of our growth. So this is number one; the Lord Jesus Himself as a Babe. He is the subject of the things that Mary kept in her heart and pondered. She is seen in the first chapter of Acts according to this. The link is that she is there in the upper room. There is nothing said about what she said or what she was to do, but she was there, and every spiritual mind would say, I understand why she is there and I will value that. What conversations could be carried on with her by any of the apostles, especially by John! I have no doubt that John would always take her into the upper room. She was his mother. The Lord had dignified him by giving him such a mother, and Mary would value, too, the place that John had in the Lord’s heart. He was the disciple whom Jesus loved. She could compare her love with his love, and it is well to compare loves. She would compare her love to his love for Christ, and she could compare, too, what she realised of the love of Christ with what John realised of the love of Christ. That would be a link, the great permanent link and will be the link between them for ever and for ever. They will not be in [p. 38] eternity as mother and son, but they were down here in the making-time.
Well, number two is still Mary, but now she has just been through an experience in which she did not shine. We are up and down, the most spiritual of us. It is still Christ; it is still her Son, but now it is the Boy, Jesus. She had gone a day’s journey with her husband back home to Nazareth. They did not know the Lord Jesus was not in the company. Many are like that. They do not miss spiritual things; staying at home from the meetings is nothing at all. The meeting is in the category of my activities but I may not miss it. I may not value it, and therefore, I may not miss it. They did not know the Lord was not with them, dear as He was to her, precious as He ought to be to her. She took no attention as to whether He was in the company or not for a whole day, neither did Joseph. And so what ensues is the boyhood life of Jesus, which ought to be supremely interesting to her; to see her Son develop and grow as Hannah of old. She came to where Samuel was with a little coat every year. Mary just overlooked this, and she went along and talked to the neighbours. Who knows what she was saying? When Jesus is left out we are apt to say things that are not too good. We are out of the realm of safety in our minds when we overlook the Lord, leave Him out of our calculations. There is a great deal of very useless talk where the Lord and the meetings are overlooked and missed, and where the things that are said in them are not attended to. But she came back, she and her husband, and the boyhood life of Jesus is proceeding. It was active, “The boy Jesus” He is called. There was a meeting of doctors in the temple and He was there. That is where they found Him. What an example for all young people, to be where divine instruction is being dealt out and spoken of! The doctors are persons [p. 39] who know, I mean, in the principle of the thing. He was both hearing and asking questions. He was not out in the edge of the company; He was sitting in the midst of the doctors. That illustrates His boyhood life. And Mary — well, she was full of superiority of a mother who had such a Son, but she has forgotten that she had neglected Him. We will never get right about a thing until we own it to someone, certainly we must challenge our own consciences about it before we can get right, before we have power to deal with matters. “Thy father and I have sought thee distressed”, she says to Him. Think of her saying that to Him in the presence of the doctors in the temple — the Lord of glory, no less. Let us never leave that out of our souls or hearts — His Person is unchangeable, mysterious, of course, in a Babe or a Boy, that it should be there, but it is there. “Thy father and I have sought thee distressed”. That was a reproof. Think of reproving the Lord! Martha did that, too. We are apt to do it. The Lord Jesus says to His mother, “Did ye not know that I ought to be occupied in my Father’s business?” You and my father, that is the ‘ye’. In fact, she is not called Mary here, it is the mother; that is the person who had a long acquaintance with Him in a motherly capacity, but she had failed on that point. It is the mother here in this part of the passage, “Did ye not know that I ought to be”. It is no question of my fancy or my joy, but “I ought to be occupied in my Father’s business”. He rebuked her in the most beautiful way. Well, that is number two, so it is a question of gathering up something in spite of my failure. She did not fail in this, to pick up something out of the incident; it is a sort of salvage. It is said of her in verse 51, “And his mother kept all these things in her heart”. She kept them all. She would not have kept her own saying surely. She would be ashamed of them for ever, that she rebuked [p. 40] the Lord; but all the things that Jesus said, that is the point. She kept them in her heart. The boyhood of Jesus, it is part of her life, part of the food, part of the meat-offering. It is most holy. And that is really what she kept. That is what it was; it was a meat-offering — what He was in His boyhood. She had the babehood state already and now she has His boyhood, so after all, she has not lost. “If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart and knows all things” (1 John 3:20). Her heart would have condemned her for rebuking her Son, but God was greater than her heart and knoweth all things. So that she had these things in her heart, but she was not overcome with her failure. It is a question of how quickly we can recover ourselves, and that is what she represents when she becomes still the constructive repository of things relating to the Lord Jesus. It is a building up of things in her heart. “Keep thy heart more than anything that is guarded” (Proverbs 4:23). She was keeping it in spite of the breakdown in the temple. Probably she showed a little temper in what she said to him, quite possible. But she changed. She is still what she was really; she is treasuring things relating to Christ here in His boyhood.
Well, now, going to Genesis, the Lord is here typically at seventeen years of age, which I would say is a little above boyhood. He is getting into young manhood, and he is in a very mixed state of things externally. He is keeping sheep with his brothers. Some of them were naughty brothers. They were sons of the maidservants. Young schoolboys are apt to be very naughty in their remarks, learning them from others, and these young fellows were like that; and Joseph, we are told, reported to his father what they were saying. It says, “And Joseph brought to his father an evil report of them” (chapter 37:2). So it is for young brothers, I am calling on [p. 41] young brothers potentially even if you are not actually yet — to see to it that you are not picking up bad language at school or on the streets. This is no mere empty exhortation. It is a real matter with young boys and girls of Christian parents. You are said to be holy. The Lord Jesus is said to have been holy as born, intrinsically holy — “that holy thing” (Luke 1:35). He is substantially holy, but you as born of Christian parents are said to be holy, too; not substantially holy. You need new birth for that — to be converted and receive the Holy Spirit, but still you are here as holy, and it is important to see that our mouths are not made filthy by things we gather up and use. Joseph had to do with that in young brothers, and he told his father about it. It is a very safe-guarding thing to tell your father of anything you hear of that kind especially if your own brothers are guilty. It is a safeguard. That is what Joseph did, and we are told his father loved him. So that he has got a heart for Christ. Jacob had a heart for Christ. He had a heart for Rachel. He loved Rachel, but he loved Joseph and he made him a coat of many colours, a vest it is — the word ‘vest’ would indicate it is an inner garment and allude to the glories of Christ. The deeper you go in the knowledge of him, the more the glories. But then I must go on to bring out the situation. Jacob found himself capable of keeping something that was of value, that as it were, he salvaged from all this, in the midst of envy. The brothers envied Joseph, a type of the Lord, but his father rebuked him. Jacob was not quite right, just as Mary was not quite right in the way she spoke to the Lord; so Jacob was not quite right here. He rebuked him. He said, “Shall we indeed come, I and thy mother and thy brethren, to bow down ourselves to thee to the earth?” (verse 10). Well, that is the fact; it is the inference; take it as you like. But he did take it. How long he kept it in the repository,
[p. 42] he would take it out and see that was the truth of God, and that the prophet Joseph had unfolded things, a parable I might call it, in his dream. It was a dream, “I have dreamt another dream, and behold, the sun, and the moon and eleven stars bowed down to me” (verse 9). He counted eleven and left himself out. He was one of them, but the eleven bowed down to him. That was prophetic of the glory of Christ. Some day Jacob will heartily enjoy that when he understands how his son was a type of the great and glorious Saviour we all love and revere as “God over all, blessed for ever”. It is a dream about the firmament, but the other dream was about the earth — the dream about the sheaves. I am only referring to all these things which are a group of things together, but it is to focus our minds on this old brother. He is not so old yet, but he is fairly old. He is wrongly rebuking his son, but at the same time, he has got the power of recovery. God takes account of that. When you do something out of accord with right feeling, recover yourself quickly. Do not let it stand. Deal with it at once, and you are saved from it. He dealt at once with the matter of rebuking his son; he kept the saying. It is a question of Christ and His young manhood, the Lord Jesus. We have nothing about Him until he was thirty, in Luke, after this incident that I read of in chapter 2, but we have a great deal about Joseph before he became great, and that is really excess. The Old Testament fills out what is really excess in the New Testament, and what things are seen in Joseph between seventeen and thirty! He was thirty when he stood before Pharaoh. He is now seventeen years old and preserved. What virtue was in the young man! What glory shone — typical glory! I am speaking of that. I am speaking of Christ; what the Lord was in the years from His boyhood until He was a Man of thirty. The eye of [p. 43] heaven was upon Him undoubtedly, and so it is that we get in Joseph what we do not get in Luke. We can fill up the years, with the young man, as I might say, the young man of Genesis. That is what I consider Joseph to be. He is the young man of Genesis. Genesis is a book of old men; it is characterised by old men, but he is the young man; not simply a young man of Genesis, but the young man. His father came to see him. The point I am making, dear brethren, is to get ourselves right when we are wrong, especially as regarding the traits of Christ in one another. Get right about them at once. That is what I am seeking to show. Jacob got right; nevertheless he observed the saying. He kept it really; that is the word. He kept the saying, so that Christ is seen in Joseph; the young man Joseph is kept. This wonderful saying is kept, this wonderful dream about the sun and the moon and the stars — heaven brought down into the scope of his father and mother and eleven brothers — thirteen. They would bow down to him. Let us learn to bow down! It is a fine lesson to learn, to accustom ourselves to bow down to One who is superior, divinely superior. The Lord Jesus is God. “For he is thy Lord, and worship thou him” (Psalm 45:11). Jacob would learn that.
Well now, to sum up we shall come to Timothy. The writer is now an old man, and he is saying in effect there are precious things to be kept in the heart. The Lord is going to take him and these precious things are to remain here. They are not to be taken away with Paul. “And the things thou hast heard of me in the presence of many witnesses, these entrust to faithful men, such as shall be competent to instruct others also” (2 Timothy 2:2). That is the idea, so that Timothy is to be left here, a young man. His teacher is going to be taken away from him. It reminds us of Elijah, the teacher of Elisha [p. 44] at the banks of the Jordan. What a scene it was! His master was to be taken away from him that very day, and he says, I know it. Whatever the sons of the prophets might say and think they knew better, they did not know better. They did not know as well as a man like Elisha. Elijah was to be taken up. This epistle contemplates Paul about to be taken up, as it were, from Timothy. What is Timothy to do with the ministry? Well, he says, I have it all written down. Maybe he did. There were books, but Paul was not content with the books. He does speak in this very epistle about a library. The books, he says; the parchments; bring them to me. He wanted to have those books, but he does not say anything about that in this chapter. He says to Timothy, “Keep, by the Holy Spirit ... the good deposit entrusted”. Now I left out two or three words: “which dwells in us”. If Paul is going, the Holy Spirit is remaining, and He is actually remaining in a dwelling place, and Timothy was that dwelling place. What a wonderful thing that is! The books may be burned, but the author of the books, the Holy Spirit, is not only a visitor, in Timothy, He is a dweller. That means He has conditions of dwelling. The Spirit will dwell as we give Him conditions, but He is there in all His capacity to function. So the apostle implies that the things you have — you have got maybe through me or others — are not to be discarded at all. They are to be retained. You have them, but the point is how (and it would apply to Jacob as it would to Mary). Ultimately all Mary had, if it were to be kept, it must be by the Spirit. The Spirit alone would enable her to keep undamaged the precious things she had in her soul, in her heart and her mind relative to the Lord Jesus. It is the Holy Spirit. “Keep, by the Holy Spirit which dwells in us, the good deposit entrusted”. That is how that matter is to stand as far as I see it, in the present [p. 45] upheaval; how things are to be kept. The bookcases are certainly not reliable. They can never be anything but aids; that is, what supports is what you have got in your own soul, what the Spirit gives. Anything beyond that may be useless, or worse, if you rely on what you read; whereas it is the good deposit that is to be kept, not by the books but by the Spirit; that it has a dwelling place in the heart. It is really one of the most wonderful things that Paul could say to any servant that He dwells in us. But we are to keep by Him the good deposit. What we have got of the knowledge of God and Christ and the Spirit Himself and the assembly and the whole range of truth is to be kept not simply in the books but by the Spirit in our own souls. All the inwards are brought into action and always functioning so that there is freshness and power in our persons. May God bless these thoughts!