ETERNAL LIFE NO. 4

ETERNAL LIFE NO. 4

As to ———— it is very sad. It is simply preposterous to say that weariness is an expression of eternal life! Is our blessed Lord weary now? Was He ever weary before He became a Man? In everything He did, and was here as a Man, whether in weariness, which was new to Him, or in Almighty power, which was natural to Him, He was ever God manifest in flesh. Everything was in divine beauty and according to the life of God, all derived from God. There is no redemption, no atonement, if Christ was not a real Man, and that He gave up ‘the life to which sin attached’. “He died unto sin once” (Romans 6: 10). It is the 1866 controversy revived. ———— attacked J.N.D. for saying that our blessed Lord gave up the life to which sin attached. If our Lord was not a real Man, who has removed the judgment which lay on man? ———— writes, ‘He entered into the circumstances of men.’ This is unsound to a degree. He was a real Man. An angel could not enter into circumstances of men. I do not know where this will end! The effort to reduce eternal life to the details of human life I have seen for some time. Instead of seeing that eternal life is in an out-of-the-world condition, the effect is to reduce it to an order of life within the compass of the senses, and not as J.N.D. says of it, ‘outside the senses’. Be assured — and I say this confidently before the Lord — that the root of this controversy is not seen by many. The root is the reluctance to be heavenly. Souls are glad to be relieved of the burden of their sins by the work of Christ, and there is also a certain pleasure in hearing of the exaltation to which we are raised in Christ; but to live here as those who have in conscience accepted that the end of all flesh has come before God, and this in this place, “The earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up” (2 Peter 3: 10). (see Genesis 6 in type) — is repugnant and intolerable to every natural feeling. No wonder that “all in Asia” turned away from Paul. No wonder that faith or a creed can be held now without conscience; that is, without a sense of God’s claim on me because of what He has made me, and of the resources He has given to me in His grace....