ADAM SUPERSEDED BY CHRIST
ADAM SUPERSEDED BY CHRIST
The rose long in bud has burst into full bloom! As I have in measure watered it and watched it with a gardener’s care, surely I can rejoice in its prosperity with a peculiar joy. “I am glorified in them” (John 17: 10) was the greatest satisfaction to our blessed Lord as to His own.
[p. 196] I have compared a saint prospering to a standard rose-tree, the stem nothing but a briar from the hedge, but grafted with Christ, and when in blossom, that is fully for Him here, it necessarily sheds forth the fragrance of His name.
It is a wonderful thing to be left here to be entirely for Him, and that He should be pleased seeing Himself truly represented on the earth when He is absent. The bride will be the full portraiture of all His blessed ways as a Man.
It is no easy thing when one has been enveloped with human niceness in religion to get quite clear of the net. You must have much patience with dear ————.
The friends are peculiarly nice in a human sense, and there is nothing which entraps the feet, and clogs the heart like human niceness, what scripture calls “honey”. The only way to get clear of honey is by learning Christ, His superiority. No rule or doctrine will supersede Adam, it must be Christ. Nothing but the Solomon beauty of Christ will eclipse what is of man. Until He is known as the wisdom of God the soul cannot be proof to what is of man. Many a one knows and enjoys the grace of God in Christ Jesus, who has never yet seen Jesus in the glory of the Father’s throne, and until he does, he has not seen One who is in everything superior to the best exhibition of a man on earth. When you are sensibly united to Christ in glory, you begin to see a beauty in Him and in His things which throws all of man here into the shade. All human niceness is superseded by divine beauty.
It is impossible to turn away your eye from what is to your natural sense beautiful. You can only be diverted from it by the surpassing beauty of Christ. When you see that, all of man is lost sight of without a struggle.