THE SECOND MAN DISPLACING THE FIRST

THE SECOND MAN DISPLACING THE FIRST

Luke 3:16,17; Luke 3:21,22; Genesis 32:9-12; Genesis 32:24-31; Genesis 35:9-15; Genesis 46: 29,30; Genesis 50: 7-10

We were speaking this afternoon, dear brethren, of the importance of the priests feeding on the oblation, and also on the sin offering, and you might say that in principle feeding on the oblation involves that our souls are formed in the appreciation of the second man, while feeding on the sin offering involves that we are developed in the power to judge and repudiate the first man, and that is what I seek grace to develop a little this evening. That is a line on which God is working with us all, to develop with us appreciation of Christ, and at the same time to develop the readiness and ability to refuse what is not of Christ, and that idea is largely connected with the thought of the threshing floor, which we have brought before us in the first and last passages that I have read. In the reference to the Lord thoroughly purging his floor it is a threshing floor, and the fan in His hand is a winnowing fan. The idea of a threshing floor is the separation of the wheat from the chaff with a view to the retention of the wheat, while the idea of a winnowing fan is similar, but has in view the getting rid of the chaff.

You will understand, dear brethren, that these exercises which the Lord intends should be going on constantly in our souls, would develop the ability to discriminate between what is of Christ and what is not, and to ally ourselves with what is of Christ, and afford scope for its development. So John the baptist, as we read in the third chapter of Luke’s gospel, speaks of the coming in of Christ, and says, “I indeed baptise you with water; but one mightier that I cometh, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose. He shall baptise you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.” That is what would characterise the service of Christ. It could not be effective, of course, until He had accomplished redemption and gone on high, but John refers to it as the great thing, so to speak, that would come about as the result of the coming in of Christ. John’s own service only went as far as baptising with water. His was a powerful ministry which called upon those to whom it was addressed to repent. It really called for self judgment, but the ministry of Christ would go further. The ministry of Christ would involve the giving of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit would bring in positive appreciation of Christ in those who received the Holy Spirit, and formation according to Christ by His power. At the same time the Spirit’s presence and operations would bring in the element of fire, which is in accord with what God is in His nature. “Our God,” it says, “is a consuming fire.” His love will not tolerate any form of evil. Eventually evil will be consigned to the lake of fire. That is a necessity of divine love, that evil should be confined to its own place, but the presence with us of the Holy Spirit is in complete accord with what God is in His nature. And so it is well, dear, brethren, to recognise that these are the lines on which the Lord is working with every one of us. John goes on to say, “whose winnowing fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his threshing floor, and will gather the wheat into his garner, but the chaff he will burn with fire unquenchable.” The Lord’s activities with us have in mind a bringing into view of the wheat, that is what answers to Christ in heaven; for wheat, I believe, is always typical of the heavenly One, and He will burn the chaff with fire unquenchable.

So now one would call attention to the way the Lord Jesus is presented as He enters upon His public ministry. It says that “When all the people were baptised”; that is, John’s ministry was effective and a great many people were being baptised. They were marked by repentance before God and were accepting John’s testimony, that really what was needful was that they should disappear in the waters of death. Now all the people being baptised, Jesus also was baptised. It says, “Jesus also being baptised and praying.” I need not say that He did not need to be baptised so far as He Himself was concerned. His action in accepting baptism was one of identifying Himself in grace with the repentant ones who were accepting the testimony of God through John the baptist, about themselves. Wonderful grace that the Lord should do that. It was a figure really of His entering into death, for it is in His death that He has fully identified Himself with us in the condition in which we were. And by means of His death He has before God closed up that condition, so that God might righteously give us the Holy Spirit. But here Christ is brought before us in His own distinctiveness as a Man wholly delightful to God. It says, “Jesus also being baptised and praying,” as though praying was characteristic of Him. It is, as we know, a feature constantly recorded of Him in this gospel. Praying is one feature of true manhood according to God. It gives God the glory; dependence on God is a feature of true glory in man. It is what is fitting in a man, and Jesus set it out perfectly, so that as He comes into view, publicly for the first time He is seen as marked by that feature. And it says, “Jesus being baptised and praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him.” He descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon Him. It was the Holy Spirit, committing Himself unreservedly to the Lord Jesus, and that in the character of a dove. There was no suggestion of fire, of course, in the case of the Lord Jesus, there was no need for that. Fire is necessary when it is a question of the Holy Spirit in reference to us, but when it is a question of the Holy Spirit in reference to the Lord Jesus He descended in bodily form like a dove; a dove, as has often been said, representing great sensitiveness, but yet it could rest undisturbed upon Jesus. And then there came a voice out of heaven saying, “Thou art my beloved Son, in thee I have found my delight.” It was the Father’s voice. It had reference to what had appeared under the Father’s eye during the thirty years of private life of the Lord Jesus; He had found His delight in it. That is a great encouragement for us, dear brethren, and especially when we are young.

It may be that our circumstances are, as men would say, very ordinary, and we might feel we would like to do great things for the Lord, but it is an important thing to realise that even the Son of God was here for thirty years in the ordinary circumstances of human life ordered for Him of God, placed in relation to parents who lived at Nazareth, brought up by them, working in a carpenter’s shop as a carpenter. All this, people would say, was very ordinary, but in those circumstances, over a period of thirty years, God found His delight in Him. It is not a question of great things being done. If the Lord wills it, great things may be done in due time, but the point is to be faithful in that which is least. We shall never be faithful in that which is great if we do not learn to be faithful in that which is least. And it is in the ordinary conditions of human life, home life, school life, business life, and all the ordinary conditions that God appoints for His children, it is in these, in the first place, that we have to learn to be pleasing to God, and we can learn to be pleasing to God in them as keeping near to Christ and taking character from Him. He has filled them out in every detail, in every stage of human life from babyhood up to full grown manhood, and that perfectly according to God so that at that time a voice out of heaven said, “Thou art my beloved Son, in thee I have found my delight.”

Now the One who thus caused delight to God, is available to every one of us. We may all abide in Him, by the Spirit, and He will be prepared to influence us and direct us and control us so that we may take on the features that came to light in perfection in Him. I need not say that a voice from heaven had never spoken like that before to any man. This was now the heavenly Man, out of heaven, a divine Person become Man in order to bring into manhood all that was morally excellent in the sight of God; and He has come in to abide. He having come in, you may rest assured of this, that God intends to set aside for ever the first man. The second Man has come in to abide, and God’s work in every one of us as being taken up by His grace is on these lines of bringing in the second Man and displacing what is of the first. We may as well yield ourselves to it, dear brethren. If we set ourselves against it in self-will or pride or indifference we are only inviting the ways of God in discipline and they may be severe. They are sometimes severe. God intends to reach His end with every one of us. He has taken us up for the greatest conceivable blessing, and He intends to reach His end, and we are only acting in a most foolish way if we set ourselves in any way against what God is set to bring to pass with every one of us.

Having said that much by way of introduction, I want to refer briefly to these incidents in Jacob’s history, because Jacob is taken up in Scripture as a type of the believer. As the subject of God’s ways with him in formation; indeed, Jacob’s end, so far as the record goes, is even greater than Abraham’s.

I am not suggesting that Jacob was a greater man than Abraham, but the end of Jacob is delineated for us and he is seen to be a man of great spiritual power, one who was wholly pleasing to God, finishing up as a worshipper and a great blesser. That is how Jacob finishes, and that shows the kind of product that God has in mind to secure with every one of us. Well now, as we come to chapter 32 God is beginning to take Jacob in hand in a definite way. He had had him in hand already, but Jacob had gone his own way for twenty years and now the time had come, so to speak, when God decides to take things in hand definitely, and so in the previous chapter He told Jacob to go back to the land. Jacob obeyed, and as he comes to Mahanaim he sends messengers to meet his brother, and receives word that Esau is coming to meet him and four hundred men with him. Now this is a serious matter for Jacob, for he remembers that twenty years before he had acted unbecomingly to his brother. It is quite true that the motive underlying his actions was a good one, that is he valued the blessing and he wanted to get it, but at the same time he supplanted his brother and deceived his father, too. And now the time has come when God is going to raise this matter with him. His brother had been so offended that he even wanted to murder him, and now Jacob hears that he is coming to meet him and four hundred men with him. The matter is assuming very serious proportions. It is one thing to meet an offended brother by himself, and another to meet that brother with four hundred men on his side. God is causing this matter to appear in very serious proportions, and that is exactly how things do appear, dear brethren, things that we have done that are wrong, when we get into the presence of God. They may seem very trifling when we do them, but when we get into the presence of. God they assume serious proportions, and God intends that they should. Jacob had to face the matter according to God.

There can be no progress in us unless things are faced according to God. And therefore it says that Jacob said, “O God of my father Abraham.” Now he is cast upon God, he is beginning to face things with God in exercise, and he calls upon God and reminds Him of what He had promised, and how He had told him to return to the land, and he says, “I am too small for all the loving-kindness and all the faithfulness that thou hast shown unto thy servant.” He is acknowledging all that. All that is to the good, and he reminds God of His promises, how He had said, “I will certainly deal well with thee, and make thy seed as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude.” That is to say in his soul he is holding on to the promises of God. It is a good thing for us to do that, dear brethren; we have the light in our souls from the Scriptures of what God has taken us up for, indeed before the foundation of the world he has marked us out for something, “according as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and without blame before him in love.” He did that before the world was founded, and now we come to face practical exercises with Him. You may say, I do not know much about sonship; I do not know much about the liberty of it; I do not know much about the joy of it; I do not know much about being holy and without blame before God in love. We can, so to speak, remind God of what He has committed Himself to, not that He is ever likely to depart from it, at the same time He loves to see us hold Him to what He has said concerning us. So Jacob gets to God about these matters. He asks to be delivered from his brother Esau, and bases his plea on the fact that God has sovereignly said that He will bless him and make his seed as the sand of the sea-shore. God will answer a prayer like that, but not without exercise on Jacob’s part. And so we read at the end of the chapter that Jacob was left alone and “there wrestled a man with him till the breaking of the day.” The prophet Hosea tells us that it was God; Hosea 12: 3. God deigned to wrestle with Jacob. Think of the grace of God deigning to wrestle with us in our self will; for that is what it is. Jacob was a self-willed man and strong in his will and thoughts, and God was deigning to wrestle with this man in order that He might break his will and bless him. There is no possibility of blessing until our wills are broken, but now Jacob has not given way, and God says to him, “Let me go, for the dawn ariseth.” God would say, you have gone on long enough and you are not submitting, so I shall have to go, a dreadful thing if Jacob had let Him go. God was putting him to the test, did he really want the blessing? And Jacob says, “I will not let thee go except thou bless me,” and then God says to him, “What is thy name?”

Now if God says to you or me, “What is thy name?” what are we going to say? You cannot say what is untrue to God, you dare not, it is a question now of coming out with the truth. God says, “What is thy name?” and Jacob says, “Jacob.” He came out with the truth. Jacob means supplanter. He did not excuse it or embellish it or wrap it up, he just came out with the truth. That is what God was waiting for, and what He is after with every one of us, in order that He may bless us, that we will really acknowledge the truth as to what we are, not what we have done but what we are. “They that are in the flesh cannot please God.” The first man is incurable and the sooner we come to it before God and acknowledge it, the better. That is what God was after with Jacob, and He says “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel.” He is giving him an entirely new name; and that, for us, is either the reception of the Spirit, or the point in our spiritual history when we realise the import of the Spirit having been given. We understand that God has removed the first man in the cross of Christ and has set us up in the life of another Man, that is, Christ, and the Spirit is the power by which that life becomes effective in us, and, dear brethren, as having received the Spirit of Christ we are indeed ennobled, we are princes of God.

As having the Spirit, Jacob is ennobled; he is a prince of God, and that is what every saint is who has the Spirit of God. I have no doubt, if one may venture to refer to it, that the members of the Royal family in England have been brought up having in view what they are, that they should learn to behave and move in a way that befits royalty. And if we understand what we are as princes of God as having received the Spirit, we have something to keep in mind, a standard before us, to be learned in Christ, of what is befitting those who are thus dignified of God. Are we going to demean ourselves by being marked by the self-will or pettiness or ambition that may have previously marked us, or are we going to appreciate that there is now just one Man before God in whom He finds delight, and that His intention is that we should derive life and character and impulse from that Man? And so God says, “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel, for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.” And then Jacob asks Him His name, but God does not tell him His name then. He is going to tell him that later on when he is ready for it, but at the moment He just blesses. The point reached is sufficient for the moment and has to be consolidated. As Ruth says to Naomi, “Where thou goest I will go, where thou lodgest I will lodge.” That means, that you understand that the truth of God necessitates movement, but on the other hand every now and then you have to lodge somewhere for a short time, for the truth reached has to be consolidated before you move on to something fresh. So God does not tell Jacob His name there and then, but He blesses him, and Jacob calls the name of the place Peniel, saying, “for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved. And as he passed over Peniel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh.” The sun rose upon Jacob, that is a new day has dawned for him. So it is with us, beloved brethren, a new day dawns for us when we really take it on in our souls that God has set us up in the life of another Man. But then there is this halting on his thigh. God has weakened Jacob, he is to understand that he is not to go on in a self-reliant, self-confident way. Anyone who is abiding in Christ is marked by dependence; there is no self-confidence in such an one. Dependence marked the Lord Jesus; there was, of course, no occasion in Him to fear evil as we have to fear it in our flesh, but at the same time the Lord Jesus set out in perfect dependence what is befitting to a man; and God intends that we should learn that the life of Christ in us expresses itself in dependence on God.

Well now, we pass on to chapter 35, and it says in verse 9 that God appeared unto Jacob again. Jacob has now reached Bethel. God told him to go up to Bethel. It is a great thing to understand that we belong to the house of God for that is what Bethel means, the house of God. We belong to it, but indeed we are it. We “are builded together,” it says, “for an habitation of God through the Spirit.” We are always the house of God and not simply when we are assembled together. We are the house of God by reason of the fact that God is dwelling in us by the Spirit, and we must therefore remember that there is behaviour becoming in the house of God. God has a right to have things in His house as He pleases. So Jacob had come to Bethel and God appears to him again and blesses him, and now God says, “Thy name is Jacob.” We might have thought that was settled in chapter 32, but God is reminding Jacob that his name is still Jacob in one sense; He says on the other hand, that his name shall no more be called Jacob; he is to be called Israel, but he is to remember that so long as he is here Jacob still continues in him. So we are to remember that the flesh in us in unchanged, and we cannot afford to give it any licence or it will lead us astray. God just reminds him, but “He called his name Israel”; the matter is confirmed to him. And then God says to him, “I am God Almighty.”

Now God is making His own name known, and is giving Jacob enlargement. “Be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall be of thee; and kings shall come out of thy loins. And the land that I gave Abraham and Isaac, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed after thee will I give the land.” That is to say, God is now making Himself known to him in the sovereignty of His love. What reason was there why God should do this for Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and their seed after them? No other reason than that He was pleased to do it sovereignly, and that is exactly our position as we are brought to know God. It is a good thing that we should have our relations with God coloured by that wonderful light. You can understand the apostle saying, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” as he took account of all that God has pledged Himself to be and to bring us into, simply because it is the good pleasure of His will to do so. We may as well accept it; it will greatly increase our appreciation of God. It will greatly enhance our ability to worship God, to serve Him acceptably, if we give ourselves to think of what He has purposed according to the good pleasure of His will. And so He makes Himself known to Jacob in this way, not only purposing blessing, but almighty in His power to effectuate His thoughts. So the end of the first chapter of Ephesians brings in the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe. The result in Jacob is now seen, for “God went up from him in the place where he had talked with him. And Jacob set up a pillar in the place where he had talked with him, a pillar of stone, and he poured on it a drink-offering, and poured oil on it. And Jacob called the name of the place where God had talked with him, Bethel.” He is able to minister to the divine pleasure: That is what God would bring us to.

Now we come to chapter 46. I only want to speak very briefly on the two remaining scriptures, but here we come to a further point in Israel’s history. He is nearing the end, although in fact he lived for 17 years after this point that we read of in chapter 46. But he is now typically in the light of Christ in glory and his life is henceforth to be bound up with Him and all that is His. He has had to go through a good deal of exercise to bring him to this point. We may, beloved brethren, know what it is to arrive in the experience of our souls at the repudiation of the first man and the appreciation of Christ, and we may be formed according to Christ in very considerable measure, and yet we may be in danger of living in natural things instead of understanding that the grace of God has linked us up with Christ and the assembly and that the Christ’s things are ours. As it says in Colossians, “Seek the things which are above, where the Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God.” For it says, “Ye have died, and your life is hid with the Christ in God.” That is, all our life and interests are now bound up with Christ, and His interest is in the assembly, which He holds for Himself and for God. And so the latter part of Jacob’s history, I believe, sets forth the exercises that he had to go through in order to be rooted up from finding his life in his own things, which only tend to disappointment, and to move over in his interests and affections to find his life in that which Christ has in the assembly. But now he has come to it, and he says, “Now let me die, after I have seen thy face, since thou still livest.” He has come to real contentment.

It is a great thing for us to come to true contentment in any little measure. Whatever happens here, the assembly as bound up with Christ is going through. He is at the right hand of God, and the grace of God has linked us up with Him and the system that takes character from Him. The assembly is a sphere which is morally above, and which Christ has here for the pleasure of God, and it is to take character wholly from Him, so that “there is not Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman; but Christ is everything and in all.” It is the place for Christ and Christ only to be seen. And so Jacob says, “Now let me die, after I have seen thy face, since thou still livest.” He has been progressing in his soul. He is now satisfied with Christ. He is something like the fathers that we read of in John’s first epistle who “have known him that is from the beginning.” Jacob has arrived at true fatherhood according to God. The work of God has been progressing on the lines of the threshing floor, on the line of the separation of the wheat from the chaff so that the wheat may stand out.

This work has been going on with Jacob and it has almost reached completion and now Jacob dies and is buried, and it is a remarkable thing that when he is buried it says “they came to the threshing floor of Atad, which is beyond the Jordan.” It is as though when we die we reach the culmination of this process. Death is the final threshing floor, so to speak, and how thankfully we can anticipate it, the moment when we shall leave behind for ever, every trace of the first man. That is what death will effect for us. Why not anticipate it? I do not say we can anticipate it absolutely, but we can arrive at it in very large measure. Jacob arrives at it, and the matter is completed. There is a final setting aside, never to be revived, of all that is of the chaff, so that what God has wrought according to Christ alone may remain, in view of being clothed upon with a body of glory like unto Christ’s. We shall stand out in the likeness of Christ for His own pleasure and glory and for our own deep satisfaction too.

May God grant that we may understand the lines on which God is working, and that we may not hinder Him.