THE MYSTERY OF GODLINESS
THE MYSTERY OF GODLINESS
Every believer desires, and according as he has conscience seeks to be godly. We see desire and effort after it on every side, but little practical result; and the failure in reaching what is desired must arise from the incorrect way in which the end is sought.
[p. 114] Godliness is called a mystery, because no one can understand it but one initiated into it, one introduced into it by revelation. A mystery needs a disclosure; it is not common nor open to every one. If you are made acquainted with it you know it, otherwise it is a mystery to you. Now the mystery of godliness is Jesus Christ, in His course as God manifest in the flesh. As you understand Him, as your soul apprehends Him as He was in it, so do you understand the mystery and so are you endued with the sense of what God is in His grace and nearness to us; and this sense is in itself godliness. Godliness is the pious sense awakened by the manifestation of God in a man. As I am initiated into what Jesus Christ is, so am I endowed with godliness — true reverence of God. It is as He is known in Spirit, as God manifest in the flesh, having come down into my circumstances, and acting and maintaining God in all the weakness of them, that I am bowed into true reverence before God. I have the sense of how peculiarly near God has now been brought, and this in grace too; not merely to sympathise with me, but to maintain God in the very condition in which man failed; so that I am filled with reverence, even while consciously partaking of the grace, Nay, in a sense it is more than receiving of His grace, because it is an initiation into the greatness of the One who has come in the likeness of man to effect such great blessing for me. There is a Man doing everything suited to God; the Man of God among men — among those who in every imagination of the heart are only evil continually. The more this Man is known, the more I have a sense of His existence, the more am I impressed with reverence for One so singular and unique. No other person could produce anything like it; the effect is marked by personal devotion to Him. I am endued with a reverence of God, a sanctity of soul which otherwise must be unknown to me. One cannot get the sense of reverence, but from being in the presence of One to be reverenced.
[p. 115] It cannot be produced apart from the Person whose particular claim on me produces it. A child has reverence or piety for his parent; but it is a sense unknown apart from the parent. It is the presence and known relation of the parent which produces it. My parent cannot produce in another’s child what he can in me. In another way the presence of a sovereign produces reverence, but only in so far as he is known as such. If his relation as sovereign were unknown, he would not produce it.
Hence godliness is only produced in the soul in so far as Christ is known. It is the solving of the mystery, the introduction to Him personally, which produces this peculiar sense of reverence, and effects in me that manner and way to which He is entitled; for as I am in the sense of reverence, I yield myself piously to Him, and necessarily I drop the old man, which has been set aside in the judgment of the cross. Seeing Christ as God manifest in the flesh throws me at once into a certain shape. His presence demands it, not as exaction or claim, but it acts like a charm, because the new nature which I have answers to it. God’s Man, the only Mediator between God and man, Christ Jesus, so rivets and fixes my heart that I distinctly retire from everything unapproved of in the presence of Him who so peculiarly affects and controls me. My nature has dishonoured God and sinned against Him; but now I am in the presence of God manifest in flesh, One who has fulfilled all His will, who has walked perfectly in every stage of this life in which I am; and I find that this blessed One who is before me, to whom I have been introduced, has done all the will of God; has been justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached far and wide to the nations, believed on in the world, received up in glory. God has not only come into my very state, but He has been glorified in it, where I have sinned and failed so grievously. Hence as I am consciously before Him, as I know Him, I must abandon — [p. 116] nay, hate — the life for which He suffered here. As my soul is filled with this blessed One, my whole being becomes piously expressive of His influence and claims, and there is about me a holy subjection, a yielding of self altogether to Him. Everything is done in keeping with this pious feeling, which is produced by His presence and the knowledge of who He is, which is the solution of the mystery. It is not that I am using any effort to shape myself, but the pious sense produced in my soul by the knowledge of who Christ is shapes me; for I covet correspondence to Him, and I have it, not only the form of godliness, but the power of it. A godly man is one truly influenced and controlled by the presence of Christ as known by the Spirit, and this of course produces a manner and character as to everything, which is the fruit of godliness, for “godliness is profitable unto all things”.
Now, as I have said, every saint desires to be pious, and as it is the first desire of the new nature, so is there none which the enemy so imitates, or has so effectually corrupted in the church, and this in two ways, as I will endeavour to show; the one is the deliberate device of Satan, the other the lust of nature.
The first is foretold in 1 Timothy 4: “the Spirit speaks expressly, that in latter times some shall apostatise from the faith, giving their mind to deceiving spirits and teachings of demons speaking lies in hypocrisy, cauterised as to their own conscience”. Now the object of this terrible scheme of Satan is to substitute, as all hypocrisy does, a counterfeit for the real. He proposes, therefore, a standard of sanctity subversive of all God’s order and will; but yet, because its exactions are preternatural, beyond nature, men are deceived by it; and before long, as we see in Thyatira (Revelation 2), the church was leavened with it; and though it was never regarded as attainable by the church corporately, yet its false pretensions were not discovered or unmasked. Its exactions were of such a nature that [p. 117] only the clergy and a few monks and nuns could subscribe to it, or attempt to submit to it; hence it was really not the standard for the church, and the church surrendered the truth that it is a body where every member is necessary, and the less honourable receive the more abundant honour. Satan’s device succeeded in substituting before the eyes of men the fictitious thing for the real, the religion of popery at first, in place of the mystery of godliness. Man was made the object instead of Christ. When Christ is the object before the soul, man is shaped by the power of His presence in true subjection to Him; but when man is the object, there is necessarily a maintenance of man’s nature, whatever restraints may be imposed. Nay, the more a man can submit to such imposition, the more is his nature established in its own power, and of course in increased opposition to God, for the natural mind is enmity against God.
Now in the Reformation there was, through grace, a great deliverance. The ground-work of christianity was recovered; namely, justification by faith. Salvation, not by works, but by Christ outside of oneself, was avowed and insisted on, and the maintenance of this is christianity. But though this was recovered at the Reformation, it was not maintained that the old man was crucified in the cross, and hence they only refused the exactions of popery, but recognised the flesh as still before God.
Refusing the exaction was right; but the retention of that on which the exaction could be made, the old man, was the weakness of the Reformation; and hence there was that left in the system which gave opportunity for forms and rituals. If the flesh be recognised of God, it must be subject to impositions. But it is not recognised. They that are in the flesh cannot please God. And in Christ’s presence the flesh, the old man, is set aside, and there is such a manifestation of His power that the very manner and way suited to Him is produced,
[p. 118] which is piety, or godliness — the power of it, not only the form.
The Reformers failed because they did not see that as faith alone could save, and place man outside of himself in Christ, he must not return to that which through grace had been set aside. In not seeing this, the Reformers left the door open for the system and ritualism which have grown up since in the church; and hence the simple and only effectual way of dealing with either is, at the start, to refuse any place to the old man except crucifixion. If I am dead, there is no room for any kind of exaction or form, but the presence of Christ produces in me that which far exceeds all that any exaction could produce. Then it is, “I am crucified with Christ, and no longer live, I, but Christ lives in me”.
As to the other attempt to set aside godliness, I now only allude to it. It is noticed in 1 Timothy 6. Supposing that gain is the end of godliness, that is, that everything of advantage or elevation to man is supposed to be godliness. To any thoughtful person this leaven is but too painfully visible, and could never have obtained an entrance if the end of the first man in the cross were truly accepted and insisted on. The result of both is presented to us in its fearful array in 2 Timothy 3: 1 - 7, where christendom is shown to be worse than heathendom (Romans 1), though still retaining the form of godliness. Religious restraint and human elevation together produce a fearful state of things. The Lord keep us near Himself!