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DIVINE RESOURCES IN THE WILDERNESS

^[p. 71] DIVINE RESOURCES IN THE WILDERNESS

CAC I suppose your thought was for us to look at the divine resources for the people of God in the wilderness?

Ques I wanted a little light on what Marah is. Do you think the apprehension of Marah prepares us for the manna?

CAC It is an immense thing for us to see we have our place with God on the ground of death and resurrection. That is a simple statement, but it is of fundamental importance, and it gives character to all the exercises of saints. Redemption has really separated us from the world, and the measure of our separation is the death and resurrection of Christ.

Ques Then is Marah the learning of that practically?

CAC Yes, it has been said that we have to drink the waters of death. The waters of the Red Sea were a wall on the right hand and on the left; we are sheltered and protected by death, and if that is so, we must be prepared to taste it.

Rem We are fitted for that by finding that God is for us.

CAC Yes, we are really under the cloud (1 Corinthians 10: 1). The cloud is Romans 5, and the sea is Romans 6. If we do not know the blessedness of being under the cloud, how can we accept the sea? How could you bear to look at death, or taste it, if you have not seen the cloud? The cloud is God’s favour, the consciousness that God is for me. God intervened on behalf of His people and covered them. ‘He stands between us and the foe’. We believe on God, who raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead. That is the God we know, the God of resurrection power, opening for us a new position, and if that is so, I must take up new ground. Marah is that you must ^[p. 72] taste death to the old life, in order to get new resources and power in a new life.

Ques Is that not Romans 8?

CAC Romans 8 is the wilderness according to God, and the saints in the happy consciousness that God is for us, Christ is for us, and the Spirit is for us. If divine Persons are all for us, what a pledge of all good, and what a security against all evil!

It is remarkable that God, who provided Moses as a deliverer, provided Miriam as a responder. We get the three spoken of — Moses, Aaron, and Miriam — as leading. Moses the apostle, Aaron the priest, and Miriam who represents the response in affection. You must have all three. When God establishes the new covenant, the people have joy and thanksgiving. Joy and thankfulness are their only business. J.B.S. used to say that people never got the good of the manna till they passed the brazen serpent, but I think if the Israelites had proved the statute and ordinance of Marah, if they had accepted the statute made for them, they would not have needed to come under law.

Ques What is the statute?

CAC Christ is the statute; that is, you really accept that you are to be in this world in the path of Christ, and that means death to all the old life. What God is, is the statute and ordinance. I think in the ways of God, we are tested and proved by coming to something that is death to our natural taste and will. After knowing redemption, and coming into the triumph of God, a Christian will not go far before he is tested by something that is death to his natural taste and will.

Rem It is not pleasant.

CAC No, it is “bitter”. Unless you have Christ before you, it is impossible to drink death.

Ques Is the wood Christ as the new order of man?

CAC Yes, it is Christ as the Branch that grew up; a beautiful tree has grown up in this world. Nothing was ever seen in this world, morally beautiful and perfect, except the Lord Jesus; and one must have Him before the heart as an ^[p. 73] object, otherwise we do not see the import of it, that He was cut down, and cast into the water. Marah is Romans 6. We identify ourselves in affection with the place Christ had in this world; we do it in the power of affection. Moses cried to the Lord, and the Lord showed him a tree. God brings Christ before us. If we are tasting the bitter water, God’s way is to bring Christ before us, so that we are attracted to follow Him, to take up that new manner of life, seen perfectly in Christ. A beautiful life, perfectly suited to God, has been seen in this world. The great principle established is that nothing is to control the saint now but the will of God; a new manner of life is developed in the spirit of obedience. Death must come upon all our tastes and tendencies as natural men; there is no possibility of allowing them. We do not want to improve ourselves; we have to part company with ourselves, and until we see that is the character of life in the wilderness, we do not find the resources. The resources are to maintain us according to the will of God, not to help us to get through comfortably.

Rem We have to take up this attitude definitely.

Rem It is an immense favour to be recovered for God in the life of another Man.

CAC Yes, to really have that blessed One before us, and to estimate everything according to Christ. We estimate things so much according to common sense, but we only have a right thought of anything when Christ is in view. Christ has died here, died to sin; the impassable gulf of death is between that blessed One and every movement of creature will; and if He is really the object of my heart there will be the same breach between me and creature will. The breach of death is between me and creature will. Now we are prepared for divine resources in the wilderness, so we come to Elim, that is the assembly, and then you get the manna and the springing well.

You have accepted for yourself the relation in which Christ stood to creature will. What has creature will done for me? I have had the narrowest escape from hell. Creature will, my ^[p. 74] own will, put me within a hair’s breadth of the bottomless pit. God’s will has saved me, and it binds me to Him. Christ is the covenant which binds me to God. Romans 6 is, that you take account of yourself as dead to sin, and alive to God.

Christ never had creature will; morally there was no point of contact between Him and the world. The great gulf of death is fixed between Christ and the sinful will of man. You say, ‘Yes, Lord, I want death on my wretched, rebellious, unbroken will’. Then the water is sweet to you; you dread your will, and you want God’s blessed will, and God says, ‘Now I will support you, I will put all the resources of My kingdom at your disposal’. God would do anything for a creature who could say to Him, ‘My God, I love Thee, I want Thy will, I want the support of all Thy resources’. What a blessed God we have to do with! What one desires is that we might see the magnificence of being here, enraptured with the will of God as seen in Christ; it is a will that ensures for us all the blessed fountain of good seen in God. My will is intolerable in the universe; it must be crushed. I was a bit of an integral part of the system of evil, but now the grace of God has come in to set me up in all the resources of that blessed Man. God says: ‘I will give you His Spirit, who never did anything, or wanted anything, but My will. In the very place of responsibility, I will set you up with His resources, so that your responsible life shall not be Adam, but Christ’. “He takes away the first that he may establish the second” (Hebrews 10: 9); first the natural, then the spiritual (1 Corinthians 15: 46). Marah comes in as death on the natural, that is, natural in a moral sense. We come under control: “There he made for them a statute and an ordinance; and there he tested them. And he said, If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of Jehovah thy God”. That is the new manner of life. The conditions are actually established now. It is not that the obedience is to be less exacting than of old. Now that we are not under law, we are not to be easy on ourselves, for we are set apart to the obedience of Christ. The character of our obedience is more exacting now that we are not under law, but under grace.

^[p. 75] Ques How would you explain the difference between being under law and being under grace?

CAC We absolutely delight in God’s conditions, under grace. Even the man in Romans 7, who is not in full christian blessing, delights in the conditions; and the beginning of chapter 8 comes in as a way of liberty for this man. He does not complain of the conditions; he says, ‘All I want is power to carry them out; I find no fault in the will of God, my trouble is that I cannot do it’. Then God says, ‘I will set you up in divine resources, and give you the Spirit of My Son, so that you can do it’. You see the character of it all in Christ, a blessed Man in this world, who lived on resources that He had in God. We are not to be relieved of the conditions, but to get power to carry them out.

Then the manna comes in, the grace by which the Lord lived in this world. He touched every detail of human life. The manna touched everything, every blade of grass carried it, so the Lord touched every detail of life, in the power of heavenly grace, and He sends down supplies from heaven of the very grace that He lived on down here. It is what He lived on down here, the divine grace that sustained Him as Man down here. He is manna to us, He is the source of manna to us. He says, “My grace suffices thee”; that is manna.

Ques Is that the thought of the husband?

CAC Christ is your husband in Romans 7; that is, we have One we can count on absolutely, but manna is that He supplies the very grace from heaven that sustained Him as the Man of faith down here. He was once in the very path that I am in, and He was sustained in that path by the Father’s grace from heaven, grace was supplied for Him from heaven. He was a Man in divine favour, in blessed favour with God; because He always delighted to do the will of God, He was in full complacency and favour. He lived by the Father, that blessed Man lived by supplies from Heaven. If one may say so reverently, there never was a man so weak, “I was cast upon thee from the womb” (Psalm 22: 10). He was wholly devoted to God, and now He ministers to us from ^[p. 76] heaven the very same grace that sustained Him from heaven when He was down here.

Ques We can say the Lord was never less than God, but would it be right to say He was never more than Man?

CAC We can look at Him on our side as Man, but we must not say what He was not. That Person became Man, came into manhood. The God-Man is a misleading term, because it leads one to think of Him as not a real man. The Lord was a real Man, He was the Leader and Completer of faith. You cannot contemplate the two thoughts at the same time; that is, the Lord on the side of deity, and the Lord on the side of humanity; they are two distinct views of His Person, and it is impossible for us to take in the two thoughts at the same time.

Rem We lose by trying to set one thought against the other.

CAC The wonderful thing is that we should have His grace and His Spirit. We are in the path of that Man, and that leads to an entirely new manner of life. I feel ashamed to say anything about it, for I know so little about it; but that is christianity.

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