Either Eternal life or Satan’s
Substitutes
I should much like to direct the attention of Christians to the fact of our present blessing and to the way in which Satan acts so as to shut out in souls all present knowledge of it. He does not reject it, but he presents a substitute, and one which no one can deny is a good thing in itself. But a good thing in itself is really an evil, if it subverts God’s present thought for His people.
He (Satan) has also sought, and seeks now, either to occupy souls with the past ways of God or with His future ways. You see he chooses good substitutes, the object being to shut out the present. Those in the truth of eternal life will overcome this snare, they will resist the devil, who will “flee”, as the word says he must.
Eternal life is God’s present blessing for man, the life, never here before, was brought into this world in the Person of Christ, and made available for man in His death, see John 1, 4. Never known in the Old Testament times, it is now “brought to light … through the gospel”, 2 Tim 1: 10. It is freedom TO LIVE, and to live as sons in all the liberty of the children of God. “If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed”, John 8: 36. We want to know more of this great grace of God to us.
Moreover it is to be on earth in power; for the Holy Ghost is down here and dwells in the believer, John 14: 1. The Holy Ghost is the Comforter of the soul, ministering to us CHRIST, and He is the power which carries us on amid all the oppositions of the scene here. The outcome of these is life—that is, this eternal life which is to be lived, “never thirst” is connected with this state.
We know that there was never a portion on the earth for saints like this. “God having provided some better thing for us” (Heb 11: 40) than they ever knew in the brightest Old Testament times. We know that even saints then were “all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Heb 2: 15), through the fear of death, for death ends everything earthly, and we must remember that the blessings of saints before Christ came were all in the land and earthly. “If I have told you earthly things [new birth] and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things [eternal life]”, John 3: 12.
If the devil can make an Old Testament saint of a Christian (earthly blessings), he has made him legal—there is no liberty in that, see Gal 4: 9; 5: 1. He has turned the soul away from God’s present grace for man, namely, ‘eternal life and heavenly blessings’. On the other hand if he can engross one with the future, that is, with what we shall be in heaven by-and-by, he makes you proud and sentimental. In both cases he has succeeded, you are not in the present blessing of eternal life.
In Eden he acted thus, and it is our first introduction to him, a liar from the beginning, he is the same still. He holds up the future to Eve, he says to her, You have a good prospect, take of this tree and you “shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”, Gen 3: 5. Do you notice the subtlety of this lies in the fact that he is ignoring her present blessing, by holding up to her gaze something future, and I never knew a saint go off into ecstacies about heaven and the future, who knew much about the PRESENT—that is about present “eternal life in Christ”. I do not think we know much about heaven and the future, nor that much is unfolded of these, and to sentimentalise about them will not help any one. We know (if we study the epistles, and get the teaching of the Holy Ghost upon them), a great deal about the present, and that is what the enemy seeks to get rid of. The Colossians sentimentalised about heaven, or were in danger of it, chap 2: 18. And the apostle will have none of it, but will have “life” in the power of the Spirit of God to be lived out on the earth.
All the systematised rules and regulations for the conduct of ‘public worship’, &c, have gone back to Judaism, and are taking the saints there. All the dreamy speculations about heaven are but sentimentality. Satan’s effort is to shut out what we are, and what we should live here now, in the great and infinite grace of God, and through His word and Spirit. It is a salutary exercise to sit down alone, and to reflect on what I am, if a Christian at this moment before God!
What is the key to the discontent of quickened souls? This. When the soul is first awakened there is the desire to please God without the power. The finding out of powerlessness wrings from us the cry of Romans 7 “Oh wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me?” A life of good intentions, but all failure, since there is no power to do good. It is not “eternal life” in the power of the Spirit. He says he cannot be what he would be.
But when the gospel in its blessed fulness is accepted, everything is changed. Christ is received, and the wearied one has now another Man instead of himself. Life is there, and also the Holy Ghost, Eph 1: 13. He no longer says, ‘I ought to be what I am not’. His language, on the contrary, is, “by the grace of God I am what I am”, 1 Cor 15: 10. Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty, and what blessed liberty! The liberty to be down here, conscious of what I am before God, and to live and act in the enjoyment of that. The hidden joy of this inner life of the soul with God! If a Christian, I am now in God’s sight on this ground, but am I in the joy of it? It would not be Christianity to say, “What I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I”, Rom 7: 15. The Spirit is in me to REVERSE all this, He is in us, “so that ye cannot do the things that ye would”, Gal 5: 17. This is power. The Spirit is stronger than the flesh.
If we consider the future (as to our bodies) it is not true that we shall be some day what we are not. We shall in that day be what we are. We are the sons of God, and as He is before God (as Man, the perfect Son), “so are we in this world” Our bodies then will be suited to this. Satan seeks to occupy us either with what we were or with what we will be. I think we want to know a good deal more of what we are now in Christ before God, and with the fact that on earth we have Christ’s place and portion.
From Helps in Things Concerning Himself —vol 4, 1894