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A MAN OF ANOTHER SPIRIT

If we open our Bibles near the middle, we may find one of the three books that are attributed to Solomon. One of them is called Ecclesiastes, and at the end it has an arresting account of the decline that comes with old age and loss of faculties. It ends with the simple comment that “the spirit return unto God who gave it”, Eccles.12:7. It is an important thing to reflect that what the Bible calls the “human species” (Jas 3:7) is distinguished by that gift. Every one of us has a spirit as a gift from God. At the point of death, it is returned to the Giver, and you might say that that is automatic. How much it has been formed by God Himself, He will know. The spirit is that which gives us our character and, if God has had to do with us, it will be a moral character.

When we come to the New Testament, the first account we have of a martyr is about Stephen and at the end of his life he says, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”, Acts 7:59. That is more than what is merely automatic. I think we get the sense in that scripture of something more than we have in Solomon, that there was something formed through communion, and Stephen had something which the Lord would be pleased to receive. It was the product of the place that Stephen had given to the Holy Spirit who had filled him. What powerful things these are, what opportunities they speak of!

I have carried this verse in Numbers for a while now and its association with our brother is self-evident. God says of Caleb, “because he hath another spirit in him”. He looked different to God. It is a sober passage in which this comes, at the point where the people turn against God’s promise. What comes out is that earlier occasions of murmuring, which God had met in grace, had nevertheless been remembered by Him. We learn from this chapter that there had been nine previous occasions on which Israel had murmured. This was the tenth (v.22). That has often arrested me, that God has taken account of occasions when I have been marked by unbelief or doubt. But He will also have noticed Caleb, and on these ten occasions, Caleb had been different: God says, “and hath followed me fully”. Caleb is a man of 40 years old here, he is not an old man. We read of him next when he is 85 years, and he is still the same. His death is not recorded in scripture. We have seen Caleb in our brother. We have seen a consistency, a consistent acceptance of the will of God, a consistent acceptance of what our brother has learned that should mark the people of God and the fellowship they share together and the truth they hold. We could say of him, “and hath followed me fully”.

God makes two promises to Caleb: “him will I bring into the land whereinto he came”. Our brother had tasted what God’s inheritance was like and he held it, as Caleb says, in his heart (Josh.14:7). It is not simply that he loved it, although he did, but he held it where the spring of his life was, and for that reason it governed him in everything he did and thought. What powerful things these are and how attractive they are. If Caleb was required to be patient and if, even at the end of his life, he was required to face conflict and effort to have what God had promised him, he accepted that in the will of God. He would not settle then for something lower. As he says here, God is well able, and that was a faith that he never lost.

I draw attention to this last portion because that is what applies to us here today: “and his seed shall possess it”. Our brother has a big family and we have all had an association with him. We call him a brother not because we were related to him but because we walked in fellowship together. The question is, do we share this zeal, do we understand where it comes from, are we ready to be different, are we ready to follow God fully, are we ready to set our course so that nothing will deprive us of the inheritance that God has promised – any of it? What an influence Caleb had. I think it would be fair to say that perhaps the happiest day in his life was when his daughter claimed the inheritance he had longed for. She was not asking for something different, she would not have contemplated anything less; she wanted the best of what he had longed for. I say to our brother’s family, and I say to us all, is that what we want?

The passage in Numbers is about our spirits in relation to God, and this passage in Corinthians is about our relations with one another. What comes out here is very simple: fellowship is a spiritual matter. It is not an organisation, it is not secured, maintained or preserved through mere conformity or uniformity, although of course agreement and walking together is most important; but these things spring from walking in the same spirit. What a testing thing this is! Think of Titus when Paul was taken from him into prison; Titus would wonder who he could walk with now in the same spirit. I urge this upon us: fellowship is by its nature essentially spiritual. I believe that what our brother has shown to us is that our constancy and preservation in that environment depends upon the way in which our spirits have been formed, and formed together, by our relationships with God.

May He bless the word.

Word at a burial meeting, Dorking

15 February 2017

D.A. Burr

Edited and Published by John Brown and Paul Martin

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