THE WORD
THE WORD
The word connects us with the Lord. It is wonderful, when we reflect on it, that our minds should be influenced by and made to comprehend the mind and counsel of our God; and all His word is connecting us with His Son, a Man in heaven, not connecting us with the mere destiny of man or of nations, but all rolled round, and rolling us, if I may so say, round this blessed One, the Lord of life and power. The Scriptures give us the judgment of God regarding everything in relation to His Son, and as the word abides in us we are able to meet and overcome everything in this judgment - you know your own proper course and also the true course of everything. A spiritual man “judgeth all things”. (1 Corinthians 2: 15) I think it is a great matter to connect the Lord with the Scriptures - souls lose much when they separate them in any degree. I believe the Lord’s way with the two disciples going [p. 130] to Emmaus is often His merciful way with ourselves. He is near us, and we see Him. Sad perchance like them, He opens the word to us, connecting all with Himself. What a moment of deep education! and then at length leading us to a full recognition of Himself in that which typified His death. I do not say the Lord’s supper, I merely trace this interesting scene to mark the manner of His ministry to ourselves. He is on the other side of the grave, but He is filling the mind and heart with Himself. He educates the soul first with the word and then draws on their feelings, and responds to them in making Himself known to them. This is very striking, the word is the groundwork in their souls, that Christ must have suffered and gone to glory; but this being laid, and laid by the master hand, so that their hearts burned within them, He now makes Himself personally known to them in that which symbolised His death, because His death declared the nature and quality of His love. The living Christ conducted them to where the “weeds were wrapped about my head”, (Jonah 2: 5) in order to convey to their souls the love of the heart of the living Christ. It is quite a different thing to emerge from the grave to glory, to what it is to descend with my living Lord into the bars of the grave, and to obtain from Him an idea of the heart of Him who lay there, having gone under judgment for me, not merely now to occupy me with this one act, inconceivably great as it was, but to teach me the heart of the blessed One who did it. Our feeling may be too much confined to mere acts, and thus lose the deeper blessing of being rooted and grounded in love, and thus comprehending “the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge”. (Ephesians 3: 19)