THE SPIRIT'S TESTIMONY
THE SPIRIT’S TESTIMONY
The Spirit of God always makes Christ His object, but His service is to man. If you make man your object, however much you may assume to acknowledge [p. 140] God or to do Him honour, you are not in the mind of the Spirit, for God’s Spirit must glorify God first and foremost. He must uphold what alone is best.
The first temptation of Satan’s was that man should make himself an object, by thinking how he could advance himself instead of obeying God and honouring His word. Therefore my question touching every demand made on me is ‘Does it make God my object or man?’ If God is my object, then His word and revelation - as He has made it known - is the subject impressed and solely adhered to. The highest blessing for man is to know God. The Spirit of God makes Him known and maintains the truth already declared. He blesses and saves man by revealing God, and God cannot be revealed without being glorified. The moment anyone commends a thing to me on the ground of the benefit which it will be to myself, even connecting it with the promise of making me more devoted to God, I have to reject it, because it is making my benefit my object and not God’s glory.
Secondly, the Spirit of God, in every age and dispensation, abides by and insists on the revelation made; “To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them”, saith Isaiah, (Isaiah 8: 20) when alluding to the false spirits in his day. The revelation given is the burden of the Spirit of God’s teaching at all times, for He seeks to make known God.
The apostle John clearly apprehends the incursion of false spirits, and therefore gives a simple and distinct rule for testing them - every spirit, he writes, that confesseth not Jesus Christ come in flesh, is not of God. When flesh ceased to be under demand from God, the judgment of it having been borne by the Lord Jesus Christ in His death, the rule of the Spirit alone obtained place. That which was born of the Spirit was spirit. Every man in Christ Jesus was a [p. 141] new creation, and to be carnally minded, or minded in the flesh, was death; to be spiritually minded, life and peace. Now when the manner and means of all God’s ways with us would be spiritual, it was to be expected that Satan, in his opposition, would try to contravene and to subvert the Spirit of God by imitating Him. Hence we read of many false prophets gone out into the world, from whose corrupting influences we can only be preserved by this one simple test: the confession of Jesus Christ come in flesh is the fullest revelation given of God, therefore the Holy Spirit maintains it jealously, and in so doing observes a line on which no imitation can enter. It is now, so to speak, a spiritual reign; man as man is set aside, but the testimony of the Spirit is of a Man in glory, the second Adam, the Lord from heaven. Far from being occupied with improving man, His work is to develop in the souls of the saints the reality and expression of the last Adam. The only Man now before God is the One to whom all the saints will be conformed. For this we wait, for it is when we see Him that we shall be like Him; but before the eye of God as to His pleasure and blessing we are in Him now, as the Head of the new creation, the only Man that is recognised by God. Now the exclusive work of the Holy Spirit is to testify and to concentrate all testimony into this one great fact - as to Christ - and this work cannot be imitated by any other; because it is a truth which thoroughly sets aside man in nature, with his hopes and tastes and will. Therefore the world cannot bear this doctrine, the world will listen to any other truth but this, any other may be propounded by the false prophets, because all other truth may be so presented and adopted for the improvement and benefit of man.
But the testimony of the Holy Spirit that the rejected Christ now in glory is the Man in whom all God’s purposes are centred - every vestige of the first [p. 142] man being swept away in judgment, is a line on which no imitation can enter, and which can only be maintained by the Spirit of God.