SPIRITUAL JUDGMENT NEEDED TO DISCERN WHAT IS SPIRITUAL

SPIRITUAL JUDGMENT NEEDED TO DISCERN WHAT IS SPIRITUAL

Your letter followed me here.

The most powerful human mind, however exercised on scripture, cannot apprehend the mind of God respecting His own revelations. If we say we have fellowship — common mind — with God and walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth; and surely if one has not the mind of God all one’s thoughts are vain, or worse.

Now if any one is walking in nature he cannot apprehend the mind of God, and it is worse than presumption his assuming to do so. The first action in nearness to God is the action of light — exposing all that is unsuitable to Him; after light has done its work, then there is communion. Now if I see men walking in nature — not wickedness, but in self, then I know that their spiritual judgment must be defective. Each and all of J.N.D.’s opponents come under this head. They have fallen into the snare of the hour — the reckless attempt of grasping the mind of God by the natural mind being exercised on the word.

Judgment is nicely distinguishing between two things in which there is the least difference. Who will decide between Jannes and Moses? The similarity between truth ^[p. 187] and falsehood is the refinement of wickedness, and the consummation of it, and it is what we pre-eminently have to contend with now. Spiritual judgment is therefore required. But has one, who is living in nature spiritual judgment? We all know that he has not.

One word more. As to your objection to what J.N.D. says about the Lord’s sympathy with the remnant, you do not seem to me to understand what sympathy is. To be able to sympathise you require to have suffered as deeply, or more deeply, than the one whom you sympathise with, and at the same time to be so free from all suffering on your own account as to be able to throw yourself into his circumstances, and identify yourself in spirit with his sufferings. Our Lord had not passed through death, or endured bereavement in the ordinary sense, when He sympathised with Mary at the grave of Lazarus, but He felt death more deeply than she did. I believe that the great difficulty in discerning this question, as to the Lord’s personal sufferings, arises from not seeing the Son’s scope of action in doing the will of God. He made all things at first. Man in God’s image was the last made — the finish! He comes to earth of which He was the Creator, taking the very weakest place — that of a Babe: not for man merely, though to man, not to God merely, but for God. He takes away the sin of the world, He enters into every incongruity here, in holy unswerving appreciation of what was due to God. Wherever grace is the new creation is, and as it works in those who are subjects of it, there the Lord knows and understands His own virtues — what their value is, and what they have to contend with. He forms and sustains His own nature in that which is under judgment, even a judgment which in infinite grace He bore. He thus knows both one and the other.