"HE ALSO WHO EATS ME"
A.J.E.Welch
This verse just impressed me as we assembled, as presenting to us what we could speak of with reverence as a whole Christ. Previous verses refer to eating His flesh and drinking His blood, referring to His precious death and appropriating what enters into it but here it is "he also who eats me". The verse must often have impressed us as a most wonderful suggestion, that in the precious words of the Spirit of God in scripture, there should be a suggestion that we eat Christ. It refers to Him, as we know, as beyond death, glorious in His risen, ascended manhood, but it immediately brings the great extent of what is in Him as Man within the range of appropriation by us. This appeals to me as related to what we touched together on Lord's day, the way we are instructed in what is spiritual, involving the need to come into what is truly life. I sometimes feel the deadening influence of what is just religious form and such like things. Sometimes the matters that arise seem to press that in upon us, the lifelessness of a course which is just of a legal kind, giving us to feel the need of what is truly life. I just venture to suggest, dear brethren, the need of close attention to the appropriation of Christ in this sense. To understand it challenges our spirituality in the deepest way, and yet here we have a great spring of life which is according to God in the appropriation of Him.
What is in mind is that appropriation in this sense leads to formation; it leads to a constitution which is entirely of God; it leads to expansion in what we rightly speak of as the spiritual order of things. Very often we find, if we get to the Lord about matters, that any element of formation that is with us ofttimes springs in some sense from features of discipline. But this is not that; this is just the appropriation of Christ in His glory, a whole Christ, but appropriated by us so that what is in that Person as He is now in the glorious circumstances into which He has entered, enters in some sense into ourselves and leads to something which is after the pattern that is set out in that glorious Person.
Well, we are challenged as to just how far we can move in the way of experience of this matter, but I believe the Lord would leave us this evening with just that point of challenge that we may move on and appropriate in the sense of what is here: "As the living Father has sent me and I live on account of the Father". Think of the way that the Lord Jesus lived; it was in relation with the Father. And then He says "he also who eats me shall live also on account of me". This, dear brethren, is truly life, and what we have here is food, I suppose, of the most exalted kind. I know of no richer suggestion in Scripture as to food and nourishment than this verse, and I believe the Lord would impress it upon us, that we seek our way prayerfully and dependently into the appropriation of Christ in the glorious sense that is depicted here, that something might emerge among us in the sense of life and spiritual freshness and vigour that is according to His mind.
LONDON
24 January 1978
DEATH FOR THE BELIEVER
E.C.Burr
I think beloved, as was suggested in our brother's prayer at the beginning, that we all desire continually to have fresh impressions of Jesus. I suppose the consideration of Him in the gospels is one of the most blessed occupations that the believer may have, surpassed, if at all, by occupation with Him where He is, as our beloved brother has been saying. The consideration of Jesus in life in the world where He is is something that we cannot possibly exhaust. We all feel, I am sure, how little we have penetrated into the world where Jesus lives. Whatever impressions we have about the life of Jesus in incarnation from the gospels I think we feel always that John has something special. Our brothers who have spoken have both drawn on this gospel this evening. We speak of particular presentations of Jesus in this gospel, His being in control, His dignity of movement, and many things like that. These things are not out of the other gospels, the blessed activity of Jesus in Matthew and Mark and Luke. Although He is taken in those gospels, yet His movements are under His own control through the gospels. He moves with dignity in those gospels, the glory of His movements as King in Matthew, the stability and, one might almost say, the solidity of the way in which even in chapter 5 He went up to the mountain and when He had sat down His disciples came to Him - the blessed dignity and stability of the movements of Jesus! You do not wonder that chapter 5 having begun like that, chapter 7 ends with the man who built his house on a rock. And Mark, with his characteristic immediacy of Jesus' movements, but never haste; the blessedness of Jesus in activity in that gospel. And in Luke the blessedness of the movements of a Man who seems to be able to linger time after time to unfold things in the truth in parables; chapter 15 following chapter 14 and going on to chapter 16 must have been a long period in which, as it were, Jesus stood still: and dwelling, as Luke does, from the birth of Jesus and then His movements in chapter 2 up to chapter 9, concentrating in a short space Jesus in activity, then expanding into fulness the dying of Jesus from chapter 9 to chapter 23. But these features are in John, and John is special - 'John's simple page' as it has been described. I suppose it is because John does not under the Spirit fill out his gospel with detail and with parables and with miracles that the Person of Jesus stands out in such distinctiveness in this gospel and we can follow Him. I believe it is true that John's gospel is the easiest gospel to have in outline in your mind because the movements of Jesus are so distinctive.
And we come to this occasion in chapter 12 corresponding no doubt to Gethsemane where that is referred to in the other gospels. But there is something about this reference to it which is apart from and distinct from the other gospels. There is no deep depression, there is no sorrow and grief, there is no sweat as drops of blood. His soul is troubled "and what shall I say?", but the trouble only brings out the perfection of His manhood, not only bringing out His manhood, but bringing out its perfection, that His soul would be troubled as going into death. Here it is not contemplating death exactly as we have it in the other gospels as in relation to sin or sins, transgressions, or anything of that kind, but His soul troubled merely on account of the contemplation of death itself. It is the perfection of manhood which contemplates what it is to go into death in the perfection of manhood, quite apart from the question of sin and sins, but going into death in the perfection of Man. Think of the first Adam, what it must have been to him to be told that he would die, and what it was to him actually to see a man dead; these were things that were entirely new to Adam. He would have seen, no doubt, animals slain by God to provide coats of skin, but to see a man dead would be to Adam a new experience, something that he could not have conceived. Yet for One in the perfection of Jesus to contemplate going into death, Him in whom was life going into death, you do not wonder that He says "Now is my soul troubled", purely on account of going into death. We often speak of His death in John as relating to the burnt-offering, that in itself, in the way the offerings are divided up, not having to do with sins or sin or failure, but the perfection of an offering in going into death. So He contemplates death here as One who, in perfect manhood and in the perfection of the life that was in Him even in incarnation, is going into death - as Mr Darby says, to Him death was death. And it is contemplating death apart, as I say, from the question of sin and sins, although all those questions would be resolved in His death, but contemplating death as what it was in itself for man, and that in the perfection of manhood.
Then He says "But on account of this have I come to this hour. Father, glorify thy name". That is what He went into death for in this gospel, for the glory of the Father. It is not, I think, presented exactly as if it were for any other cause; it is for the glory of the Father He goes into death. It requires the perfection that was in Him to go into death for the glory of the Father. And the Father responds immediately. It says "a voice out of heaven, I both have glorified and will glorify it again". No doubt the Father's name was glorified in His coming out of death, as the Father will be glorified in the appearing. (It is very interesting to see that the Father's glory was in the resurrection of Jesus and the Father's glory will be in the appearing of Jesus - "when he shall come in the glory of his Father", Mark 8: 38). Think how the glory of the Father extends, therefore, over the whole of the Christian period, all of it embraced in the glory of the Father. And that is what He went into death for, that the Father's name might be glorified.
I thought of this, beloved, because we are having a great deal to do with death, more to do with death currently than, I think, is within the memory of most of us. Maybe the circle is smaller than it has been and thus we are more familiar and know one another, and we, therefore, miss one another more as the Lord may take one and another, but even numerically we have had to do more with death than at any other time. And it just exercised me as to the capacity any of us has to approach death; what capacity have we to approach death? It has been said before, but it is true, that for all of us one day it will be either the rapture or to depart and be with Christ. It is quite inevitable that one day it will be that, either the rapture or to depart and be with Christ. But what is our state, beloved, in view of it? Because it must be one day either the one or the other. The rapture will be, we might even say, rapturous for us; we will be caught up to be with Him in the clouds and to be for ever with the Lord; but we may have to face death and how do we face it, beloved? Are we prepared in ourselves to face death? The fact that Jesus has been into death and has been into death in the way in which He is presented in the other gospels (that is in relation to every moral question being resolved for God) means that we are able to face death apart from those moral questions; that is, knowing that because He lives, all these moral questions are resolved. Therefore for the believer there should be the capacity to face death in something, I do not say in the fulness of it, but in something of the way in which Jesus approached death in John 12. There would be trouble in the soul, because there is departure from an order of things which is well known, into an order of things which as to its actuality is unknown, and the soul might be troubled on that account. But to be able to approach death with the sense that what is involved in it is the glory of the Father is really the portion of the saint. That is the portion of the saint as contemplating death. I ask myself, but I ask my brethren too, are we prepared to face death on this high level, that to depart and be with Christ, if it is that, is but for us a fresh experience of the Father's name being glorified? It awaits the Father's word until we are raised, the Father's activity in relation to that, something to which, I suppose we might reverently say that Christ relates Himself in regard to the resurrection of the saints; but have we things so settled morally in us, beloved, that we can approach death ourselves and contemplate it on something of the basis in which Jesus approaches it here? The Lord does not allow so much death to occur without intending it to have some word to us at the present time. And the Lord does not bring death before us to make us sorrowful or sad. There is a natural sorrow and sadness which is not to be deprecated; certainly not. There is rightly a sorrow in regard to what is natural, but in what is spiritual there should be the power to approach death in the sense that for us it is apart from sin, He having resolved all those questions. There is no doubt that we cannot approach it in the same way as Jesus did, because He approached it in a body in which sin was not, in which He knew no sin, and in which He did no sin. We have bodies in which all these things have taken place, which at various times we have used for that very purpose, yet His own work delivers us from it and gives us power to approach death in some sense of what the burnt-offering is. Beloved, the Lord would just encourage us to see whether morally, spiritually, in our own souls, we have arrived at this ground. For all of us, I might say, being here tonight, there is time to take something of this ground. In Leviticus 1 it is "when any man... presenteth an offering", and that offering is the burnt-offering. There, therefore, seems to me in that scripture to be the capacity, not only to bring Christ as an offering to God, but even in ourselves to have some sense that the questions which all the other offerings involve having been resolved, we ourselves then have the capacity to contemplate death, with no doubt an element of trouble of soul, but with the sense that the object in it is "Father, glorify thy name".
Well, beloved, I do not think these things are too high for us. I think we often approach death with its necessary sorrow in the sense of the grief and all that is involved in it naturally, but for the believer there is a higher tone, to be able to approach it with those questions apart. And the Lord might even use our current occupation with death, for we have had to be occupied with it today, and tomorrow we shall be occupied with it. Who knows what we might be occupied with the day after that? The Lord knows, we do not know. But we could all be prepared, beloved, to contemplate approaching death in something - I do not set us alongside Jesus in this matter, save that He has left us a model that we should follow in His steps - something of the sense of what deliverance from every moral issue involves for us, so that we have some sense that death is but to give the Father a fresh occasion to glorify His name.
LONDON
24 January 1978
THE CHILDREN'S WITNESS
In the days of Elisha the eyes of a young man, his servant, were opened by God in answer to the prophet's prayer. Actually he was already able to use his ordinary sight - and what he had seen made him full of fear. There was a great host of enemies around his master and himself! However, given the eyes of faith, he was able to see that the powers of protection, horses and chariots of fire, were stronger than the enemies. The word of the prophet was "Fear not, for they that are with us are more than they that are with them!" This is what is meant when we speak of God's testimony, or witness, in this world having all the resources that it needs. These resources are unseen to the human eye but depend on the presence here of the Holy Spirit of God.
This lesson is one that we are slow to learn. It may seem to us, for instance, that all hopes of spreading the truth were lost in the times of the martyrs. Yet it was they who were really the victors and indeed were more than conquerors through Him that loved them. Their enemies could do nothing further against them now that they were with Christ which is very much better. Moreover all God's power remained to bless their- witness. As an example, the words of Stephen at his stoning no doubt prepared the conscience of Saul of Tarsus to bow to the will of the Lord Jesus, with untold gain to the Christian testimony. Hundreds of years later a martyr, looking at the crowd around, exclaimed 'Behold the harvest! O Master, send forth Thy labourers!’
On some of the ancient tombs of Christians in Rome there is a picture-sign of a fish. You can easily draw one with only two curved lines from a point, crossing them towards the tail and adding a dot for an eye. The sign is explained by the fact that in the language of the New Testament the letters of the word for 'fish' are the first letters of the words for 'Jesus Christ Son of God Saviour'. In ways like this even quite young persons who have died still speak a glorious message and their faithful witness goes on through the centuries. Do we who live let our light so shine that persons around may glorify our Father who is in the heavens?
J.C.Evershed
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