THE SPHERE OF LIFE NO. 3
[p. 48] THE SPHERE OF LIFE NO. 3
It is miserable work detecting error, instead of feeding on the pure word of God. I feel thankful for the way that the truth is opening out to my own soul. Out of the eater comes forth meat. The very fact of the truth being assailed makes it, through grace, only the more precious to me.
I have been very much interested in seeing the way eternal life is connected with the Father. It is in eternal life that we have knowledge of the Father and the Son. It was manifested in the Son. Abraham knew God as the Almighty God. Moses knew Him as Jehovah, but in boundless blessing, we know Him as Father, which includes all that they knew, and very much more. As we read their histories we are sensibly distanced from them in the sense of their practical power, as so beyond our own; yet we must not go back to them. This is just what the systems have done. The knowledge of the Father is, I fear, but little experienced or cultivated, and yet it is the relationship to God, or at any rate the highest, that we are brought into now, and it is the privilege of babes. It is only in the life of Christ that I can have any idea of the Father, for it is as Christ is my life that I enter into this great relationship. The better son one is to a great father the better he understands his great father. It is only as I know the nature of God, that I can know anything of His dignity. “This is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent” (John 17: 3). It is marvellous how the care of God in a fatherly way is manifested for us in all the ordinary things of our path down here. The Old Testament saints could say, although He was not then known as Father, “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him” (Psalm 103: 13); and so can we. But to know Him and His love, as the Son knew it, is another thing, and infinitely surpasses His care for us in natural things, and it is in the life of Christ that I know Him thus.