1 TIMOTHY 3
Ques How do you distinguish between the house and the assembly in verse 15?
CAC I think the house suggests a dwelling-place for God. An assembly is convened for the transaction of business in the world, and the assembly of the living God is the place where His business, if one may say so, is carried on.
Rem We are not always convened.
CAC No, we are not, but we are always part of the assembly of the living God wherever we are and if we are true to that, His interests are always uppermost with us, and we exercise a jealous care not to misrepresent Him. It is the assembly of the living God where all the blessed activities of His love and grace emanate from.
I suppose love is the most prominent and characteristic of His activities and that it comes out in the ways of saints towards each other. Do we not get a hint as to God’s dwelling-place in 1 John 3: 23, 24? The character and the very nature of God must come out in His household. Of course He gives character to it. It could not be otherwise. What a wonderful place that puts the assembly in! All that can ever be known in this world of God must be known through the church. It can only be known or reach any human understanding as seen in man. God has recurred to His original thought and intention, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”. God has been perfectly presented to the universe in a Man. And how has He presented Himself? That is the marvel. Creation was a comparatively simple thing, “He spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast”. It was an act of power. But when we come to redemption and the revelation of God in His essential nature, that was a very different thing. It involved suffering in lowly grace, in a Man, to vindicate God and reveal the blessed thought of His heart, and so the Son of the Father’s love said, “Lo, I come”: the Man who perfectly answered to God in everything. That was far greater than creation.
Ques What do you understand by the pillar and base of the truth?
CAC The truth is all that may be known of God in this world and the pillar is set up as a witness to it. The base is that which gives stability to the pillar. It gives one a fine idea of fulfilled responsibility, that the assembly of the living God [p. 359] is the pillar and base of the truth. God always secures His own ends.
All this is written to the end that one might know how one ought to conduct oneself in the house of God. It is not what doctrines we hold in our heads, but our conduct that tells, and is the testimony. That involves the mystery of piety.
Ques. What is piety?
CAC All that is of God in this world as seen in the saints. It is giving God His place in everything. It has all been livingly set forth in a Man, in the blessed Lord, and is seen now in the saints. Look at His very first recorded utterance at twelve years of age: “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” That was piety. At twelve years old the Lord had no other interest on earth than His Father’s business, and that gives us the dominating keynote of all those thirty years of hidden life. They were spent about His Father’s business. After the incident at Jerusalem, it is recorded of that holy One that He returned home with His parents and was subject unto them. That was piety! And when there were a few repentant people beginning to turn to God and to seek Him, the Lord said, ‘I must identify myself with these people’. That was piety. God said, ‘I can justify such a Man as that by My Spirit’, and the Spirit descended and abode upon Him. I love what is said of Christ, “I have exalted one chosen out of the people ... with my holy oil have I anointed him”, Psalm 89. It was as though God looked down upon this world and, casting His eye over all its inhabitants, He could pick out one Man upon whom He could look with absolute delight, and exalt Him and with His holy oil anoint Him. He said in effect, ‘That Man is wholly for Me, He is morally suitable to be anointed’. God justified Him in the Spirit. There was a holy savour, a savour of God about all that He said and did. Look at Him at Emmaus when He took the loaf and broke the bread and gave thanks. They knew Him immediately. There was that about Him which no disguise could hide. Their eyes had been holden, but directly He addressed God, they knew Him. That was piety: it distinguished Him. I had always connected it with the passage in Hebrews where it says that in the garden He was heard because of His piety.
Rem I suppose the angels saw God for the first time at the incarnation.
CAC Yes. I have often thought of how all heaven was [p. 360] astir to see that wondrous sight. Earth became a scene of the deepest interest to heaven as soon as the Son assumed manhood. The angels had known a time before the earth had any existence. They sang for joy when it emerged in all its freshness and beauty from the Lord’s hand, but that was nothing to their interest when He Himself became a Man and for the first time the angels saw their God.
Rem We have come to the universal gathering of the angels; Hebrews 12.
CAC Yes; they look down now to see God’s beautiful order in His house, with deepest interest and concern, but they cannot see what is not there. How it should exercise us, and what deep interest we also should take in the assembly! Why we are made a spectacle to angels! We often think of how we look in the eyes of the saints, we think, too, of what the world sees in us, but how often do we take account of how we appear to the angels? They see us in private, when the eyes of the brethren, or the world, are not upon us. The apostle had to get down on his knees about it and ask wonderful things for the saints, in order that now might be known through the assembly, the all-various wisdom of God, to the principalities and powers in the heavenlies. Just think of it! They once looked down upon Jesus in His holy pathway through this world, and now they look down upon us, whom He has left to be a continuation of Himself down here, now that He has been received up into glory. All this mystery of piety should be found in holy activity in the saints. Satan’s great aim is to mar this, to get between the soul and God in such wise as to make us dishonour Him. We see it in the next few verses — he would pervert God’s very mercies to this end and oust God from our natural life, forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats — two of God’s greatest mercies in nature. I suppose if Satan could get a saint to eat his food without thanking God, he would consider he had scored a victory! We have a place with God of nearness and affection and holy liberty that no angel ever had or ever will have.
We see the interest of the angels in the Lord’s earthly pathway in the way they succoured Him. They rejoiced at His birth and sang glory to God in the highest, and on earth good pleasure in men, then we find them waiting upon the Lord in the wilderness after His temptation, and again in the garden in His agony, strengthening Him, and sitting in [p. 361] triumph on the stone rolled away from His tomb and watching the place where His body had lain. Their solicitude is very marked. We do not think enough about angels, they are mentioned many times in the New Testament.
Ques Why do you think that it is called a mystery — “the mystery of piety”?
CAC It does not lie on the surface. There are several mysteries we are told about. A mystery is something that can only be understood by the initiated. We can only get at it through exercise. No divine mystery can be understood apart from exercise of heart with God about it. Only initiates can enter into a mystery.