THE DIVINE VIEWPOINT
[p. 149] THE DIVINE VIEWPOINT
Genesis 12:1; Genesis 17:10,22; Genesis 19:27,28; Genesis 22:2
My remarks, dear brethren, will bear on the importance of believers reaching the divine viewpoint. There is the entrance into the holiest, which implies that we see things as God sees them; but I have in mind to speak rather of what is more initial than that, what comes earlier in the history of the average believer, and Genesis has more in mind the thought of God coming to our side to show us things. He is doing this, and is ready to do it for any who will permit it, so that we should get the divine viewpoint; not yet in regard to the fulfilment of His counsels exactly, but in regard to current normal needs of our souls. The normal history of the believer in this respect is portrayed in Abraham. He may be called Abraham the believer, that is the model believer; and what develops in his history is God coming to his side. There was no sanctuary yet, no house in a concrete way, so God comes to his side from time to time, and it is recorded, not as a mere matter of history, but that believers of all ages might understand the divine way, and how God has set Himself to serve us; taking account of the current needs of our souls so that no one should be befogged in any way as difficulties arise; God will not fail. He comes down to us, and in the tenderest way draws us aside to show us His way of viewing things, and what is in mind for each of us; indeed He has the greatest interest in every believer.
Abraham is no isolated case — he was at the outset — but he is the “father of us all” from the point of view of faith, and he is taught of God. Certainly it ought to be of interest to see how our father in this sense was taught of God, how God dealt with him; for in dealing with our father in this sense, He intended [p. 150] that the thing should become spiritually traditional, a heritage handed down to be proved by every son and daughter of Abraham. It is not our heavenly status, but what we are here as believers. Thus we have the Lord coming down, as in Luke. God come down, as one said, ‘... see thy God beside thee, In a servant’s form come near, Sitting, walking, talking with thee! Sinai’s mount no longer fear’. (112:3). That is Luke’s aspect, and Luke tells us about a daughter of Abraham, and a son of Abraham: so the idea is familiar. It comes down to us as a heritage in the sense that God is interested in every one of us, from the first movement of faith in our souls, and in fact before, for we should not have faith if He had not been interested in us before.
We have then this heritage, that God drew near and turned aside to Abraham, or at least He took a position alongside him, so that Abraham might gain His point of view. In speaking of the outset of Abraham’s history, I would also remark that the end in view is that the believer should be gradually led on to see things, one thing after another, until he sees Christ outside of this world, and apprehends Him as the Son of God, Christ as He is now, not exactly as in relation to eternal blessedness, although that is also in view, but in relation to the testimony here.
Chapter 22 is Christ as He is now: Abraham received Isaac from the dead, in figure, but not to take him down from the mount, not henceforth to control him; nevertheless, Abraham received him from the dead. Isaac does not come down from the mount according to the record. Abraham comes down to his young men, and they go to Beer-sheba, and Abraham dwells there, but it does not say Isaac dwelt there. He remains, as it were, above for faith. That position is secured by Christ typically above. I mean ‘above’ [p. 151] in the sense of not being on the level here: ‘Jerusalem above’ and ‘Isaac above’ is Christ away from the level of this world, but still in relation to it in testimony. Therefore Rebecca comes into view immediately in the same chapter, and as Rebecca comes into view Sarah dies. God never has a void in His mind; hence in chapter 24 it is Christ and the assembly. That is the terminus, dear brethren, that I should like to lead you to; because it is most important at the moment that we should be there. It is still a time of testimony, and in the testimony the great central thought is Christ, not here on earth but on high, and the church brought to Him. Rebecca is brought to the tent, she is here, as it were, but here as of heaven. You will see that that is the great end to reach now; and God comes down alongside of us as believers to lead us on from step to step, pointing out this and that, that we might learn His way and have His outlook.
Now the first thing is that in Mesopotamia God appears to Abraham and tells him that there is something else to show him. He is to go out of his country and kindred and his father’s house, which would be something very hard, a great tax on natural feelings to be told to move thus. But it is “to the land that I will shew thee”. It is a matter of trust so far; and I may say here, dear brethren, that Genesis does not give us such a rich account of the land as we get later; nor even do the twelve spies sent up from Kadesh give us as good an account as we get in Deuteronomy. Moses is the one who gives us that; not yet having been there. He was debarred from entrance, yet no one in the Old Testament gives such an account of the land as does Moses. He is the minister, and qualified in the power of the Spirit to give such an account of the land as no one else does. It is a question now of being instructed ministerially, and ministerial instruction implies authoritative [p. 152] instruction. It is not optional, but it is the best instruction. Deuteronomy is the book that furnishes the richest descriptions of the land, and that is by the minister, by one who loves, by one who has nursed the saints forty years. He learnt to love them. The more we know the saints and have to do with them, whatever they may be or whatever their attitude, the more we love them, and the easier it is to serve them. The older one becomes in the service, the easier it is to serve; the saints become increasingly attractive. Nothing is too good for the saints, not even the best that God could provide. Moses expatiated on the land so much that God took account of it and said, as it were, ‘I will show you the land’.
Genesis does not go that far; you have to take it on trust. God does not there occupy us so much with the qualities of the land, as with the thing itself. He would say, as it were, ‘You must take My word that I have something for you. It is not a small matter, it is a land; it is a land of My selection, and if you are a believer, if you have understood anything of My sacrificing My Son to die for you, if you have known anything of My love for you, you must begin to trust Me that I have something for you. I have a land and I will show it to you’. I apprehend that normally the christian’s heart will beat high at that!
Abraham’s heart would beat, although he was slow to get into it, as all of us are spiritually. What is this that God has for us? It is certainly not a matter of progress in what this world can afford; that may be found in Mesopotamia. A good way to knowledge is on the principle of elimination. God has something for me, and He says it is a land. He is going to show it to me. It is a country; a country implies national feeling, a place that inspires affection. It is interpreted to be a heavenly country.
One can understand how Abraham would think on the way, ‘What is this land? — God has told me that [p. 153] He has a land for me that He is going to show me. I long to see it’. Abraham was detained by natural things, but his father died, and he moved into this land “in which ye now dwell” (Acts 7:4). He moved into it.
Then he is found going down to Egypt. That was certainly not the land God was going to show him. But when he had gone down to Egypt and returned, God says to him, “Lift up now thine eyes”. What a moment that is in a believer’s history, after a vicissitude of shame and sorrow. The history of his journey to Egypt and the return is sorrowful. Lot separated from him as he came back from Egypt — both were well off in this world’s goods, but that is always a danger — and rivalry set in, which meant separation. But God never forsakes faith, however bad the circumstances. As Lot separated from Abraham, God said, ‘Lift up now thine eyes: this is the land’. That is a great day in a believer’s history when God calls attention to what He has previously told him He will show him. It is the beginning of great things. Moreover God says, “Arise, walk through the land according to the length of it and according to the breadth of it”. God is not ashamed of His land. Genesis does not bring out its richness. We hear nothing of its stones of iron, nor hills of brass (Deuteronomy 8:9). It is for the believer to trust what God is saying to him. You will find nothing to disprove what God has said. God calls upon us to prove it so far, to walk through the length and breadth of it.
That is the first thing. It had the effect on Abraham of delivering him from any thought of returning to Mesopotamia. Had he had a desire he might have done so, “but now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly” (Hebrews 11:16). Abraham saw that the land, just as it was, was a better land, for there is constant increase in God’s land. Of course, now, it is a spiritual matter, and one of increasing richness. “But now they desire a better country”, says the writer to the Hebrews, “that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city”. God comes alongside those who have faith; He understands the breathings of your heart, and He goes beyond anything you have conceived. “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).
Now the next thing to learn in view of this, is the utter uselessness of the flesh, a very difficult lesson. Abraham had not learnt it yet; Ishmael was testimony to that fact. The Lord says, “The flesh profits nothing” (John 6:63). I am not speaking for the moment of its wickedness, but of its utter unprofitableness, its utter uselessness in regard to the things of God. God is showing this to Abraham in chapter 17. He had come down to him in beautiful simplicity and familiarity, a touch that ravishes the heart of faith! And we are told that He went up from him; He broke off the conversation and went up. What lessons Abraham learnt as he saw all this! God came down to him to tell him among other things that the flesh is useless. He says to him, ‘It is I. I want to talk to you personally, as a Person to a person’. What a wonderful conversation! He says, ‘I want to make a covenant with you, and it is to be between Me and you, but I want you to understand that the flesh is utterly worthless and profitless. Disallow it at once’. This is a hard lesson; but Isaac was in view. There was another coming in, different from Ishmael, not yet there, but coming. The sign between God and Abraham was to be circumcision, which means the utter unprofitableness of the flesh. It says in Romans 4:11 that “he received the sign of circumcision as seal of the righteousness of faith which he had”. It is not a sign in the heavens, like the bow in the cloud, but a sign in himself It is a question of arriving in [p. 155] himself at the power to disallow the flesh. “If ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live” (Romans 8:13). We have to definitely disallow the flesh as useless, bad, of course, but useless. It is the real power of circumcision, “the putting off of the body of the flesh” — the whole of it — “in the circumcision of the Christ”. Some may retain the best, but the whole body of it has to be put off. That is the next point; God having spoken to Abraham in the most beautiful terms, and having made the most wonderful promises — ‘I will be in covenant with you everlastingly; but there can be no tolerance of the flesh’.
No lesson is harder to learn than this, to maintain practically in the Lord’s service, and generally, the thought of having in oneself the sign of circumcision, that is, that one has the Spirit, and uses the Spirit in the disallowance of the flesh.
Then we are told, “God went up from Abraham”, but He came back later. If God leaves off the conversation, He has in mind to resume it. That is one of the most interesting things — the resumption of the conversation. The interval between the breaking off and the resumption of the conversation is to bring out the element of obedience. That is what God looks for; without it He can do nothing with you. As God left off the conversation and went up to heaven, Abraham immediately carried out what He commanded as to circumcision. Then God came back. After God has entered into conversation with you He will break it off to see what effect it has on you, and according to that effect He will come back.
This time He finds Abraham sitting in the tent door. God comes back in a confirmatory way. That is a very precious thought. There are now four, instead of two, conversing in chapter 18:2. But I want to hasten on to the thought of judgment, how God shows young people the judgment of the world.
[p. 156] Chapter 18 brings out the renewal of the promise as to Isaac: he is surely to come, the days are given; and the world has to go. That is the setting; but it is not done in an arbitrary way. God says, “Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I do ... ?”. The Lord would intimate to you that He has taken the greatest and most careful account of that world, and He would not ask you to leave it if you should not. He would say, ‘I will go down and see if the world is as bad as it seems to be’; not that God does not know perfectly, but He would assure us that He knows what it is. Moreover He has given opportunity to the world to save itself. Were there ten righteous persons in it He would spare it; all this is on the intercession of one believer. You see how much a believer can do in the affairs of this world. We have far more to do with the international affairs of the world, if we understand our privileges and responsibility, than the League of Nations, or all the embassies of the world! Abraham had it in his hands, so to speak, but it was a question of what was in the world. God says, ‘I am going down to see for Myself’. Abraham stands before Him and intercedes beginning with fifty, coming down to forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty and to ten, and God says, “I will not destroy it for ten’s sake”. But there were not ten; possibly there was only one, Lot. The Scripture says he was a righteous man. Now God goes on His way; He has been alongside Abraham, who now stands before Him in the position of a friend. How beautiful it is that God would call a believer into friendship. He would say, ‘I want you in My confidence. I will tell you what I am going to do’. You will have more light about the history of the world than the greatest statesman. “Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I do ... ?”. He is the friend of God, and so are we friends of God. Friendship with God is a great matter; it is brought in in connection with believers.
[p. 157] Abraham the believer was the friend of God. Friendship with the world today, is enmity with God.
Thus the conversation went on; Abraham did not go below ten, and God went on His way. Abraham returned to his place. Everything is in perfect order in the believer’s outlook. He has gone far enough with his requests and he stops. God went on His way, and that way meant destruction for the world. He is on that way now; destruction is sure. The Lord Jesus said, “Now is the judgment of this world” (John 12:31) — that is the moral thought; the thing yet remains, but destruction is coming.
In chapter 19 Abraham returns to the place where he had been speaking to Jehovah. He would have the divine viewpoint. God is not arbitrary; Abraham sees that his solicitations could not succeed; there were not ten righteous persons in the city of Sodom; he knew that God knew better than he. He left it with God, and went to the spot where he talked with Jehovah, and he sees the smoke of the world rising up. He is at the divine viewpoint. He has no question now about the world. That is how God brings His thoughts into a believer’s mind. He would get you to His viewpoint, to see that His dealings are perfectly fair; He did not destroy that city until it was clear that there was perhaps only one righteous man, and He saved him and his two daughters. The man’s wife looked back and became a pillar of salt. That is the third thought that I had in mind.
The next is Isaac. I have spoken of his birth that was promised; and chapter 21 tells us that he was born and weaned, that Abraham made a great feast for him in the house, and that Ishmael mocked and was cast out. That is just the history; but I wanted to show you another thing that is very difficult for believers to see, and that is that Christ after the flesh must go, not as to His Person for He [p. 158] had a perfect right to go back into heaven, but if there is to be a world for God, Christ after the flesh must die. That is what is meant in John 9, where we see the condition that Christ had taken in becoming Man: He had taken a flesh and blood condition in order that He might lay it down. It was not the final thought. A world, even with Christ in it as in flesh and blood, will not do; Christ came in to establish another world; He calls it “That world, and the resurrection” (Luke 20:35). It was in purpose, and in becoming Man, or in becoming flesh, as John 1:14 puts it — “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us” — He had in mind to set this world aside, and in doing that, to die Himself. To heal the man in John 9 the Lord made clay from His own spittle and the earth, and anointed the man’s eyes, made him worse, as you might say, and yet not worse. It is a process. He says to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam”. What is to be washed? The humanity of Christ would not defile: He was holy, harmless, and undefiled even as in the flesh; “that holy thing” He ever was! Yet what represented that had to be washed. It had to be removed, meaning that Christ died, thus ending that condition. The condition taken up is laid down, and laid down for ever. He took it to lay it down, and in laying it down He established the basis of another world. That is a lesson that is very hard to learn; that the world as it is now even with Christ in it will not do for God. In John 6 they would have made Him a king. You may think if the Lord Jesus were to come in on these lines and take charge of the nations, how quickly He would change things! But He is not doing that; He has died out of it; and in view of that, He says, “Now is the judgment of this world”. We have to apprehend Christ not as He was but as He is. The apostle Paul says, “Henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh.
[p. 159] yet now henceforth know we him no more” (2 Corinthians 5:16). We do not even know Christ now after the flesh; it is Christ in another condition. Let us take that thought in. Christ is in another world, and yet in testimony in relation to this world. That is what is in view in chapter 22. Thus you have the thought of showing.
God says, “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest”. Could there be any doubt as to whom He had in His mind? The earlier part of the chapter is full of the preciousness of this person, and what he is to his father. “Get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of”. It is a carefully thought out thing, and the mountain, it says, is to be shown. Abraham obeys, and takes his son, his only son whom he loves, and offers him up for a burnt-offering, and receives him from the dead, in figure. Now where is Isaac? That is what I should like to ask every young heart here. Where is Christ who has died? What is His present condition? We read of His having a “glorious body” (Philippians 3:21). In the forty days’ sojourn here after His resurrection we have the spiritual body, glorious of course, but we also read of His glorious body — what He is up there. Does it not ravish your heart? That is how the church comes into view. He is presented as a heavenly Christ to ravish the heart of the assembly. Hence Rebecca is immediately in view in the end of this chapter; it simply means yourself or myself as apprehending the thought of a risen, exalted Christ — and that we are His body. The Holy Spirit takes us to Him. Surely you will go, if you have travelled on the line of which I have been speaking! The blessed God has shown you things, and now He shows you Christ as He is in heaven. The Holy Spirit has come down from Him.
Beer-sheba is now in view as the dwelling place of Abraham. It means that faith says, ‘Now everything is secured. I have not a doubt now. Every promise is Yea and Amen in that Person’. That is the idea in 2 Corinthians 1. So the apostle says, as they were questioning his veracity (a common thing among the saints, alas!), ‘I did not say Yea, and then, Nay’. “Our word to you is not yea and nay. For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, he who has been preached by us among you (by me and Silvanus and Timotheus), did not become yea and nay, but yea is in him. For whatever promises of God there are, in him is the yea, and in him the amen, for glory to God by us” (2 Corinthians 1:18 - 20). That is Beer-sheba; that is what establishes you in that city, so to say. It is the outcome of the statement of the apostle that “God is faithful”. That statement hangs upon Christ’s present position in heaven as the Son of God. Everything is secure there; it leads us into an entirely new world. The church belongs to that realm, the new state of things, but it is still in testimony here.
As we follow along the line of divine showing we shall reach this terminus, and in that position we shall be effective for testimony here, and that is what God is aiming at, that Christ and the assembly should be clearly in view. So that in Revelation 22 Jesus says, “I am the root and offspring of David, the bright and morning star. And the Spirit and the bride say, Come”. That is, as we may say, Abraham’s servant and Rebecca. “The Spirit and the bride say, Come”. It is Christ as He is, not as He was. It is the same Person, but it is Christ as expressing the purposes of God and the glorious condition of the assembly as His body and bride.
May God lead us on these lines. I am speaking for young christians as much as for others, that God might come down and teach us step by step, leading us on, until we reach that end, and then we shall be luminaries, shining as lights in this world.