“Heavenly Things”
“HEAVENLY THINGS”
“If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?”
“The first man is out of earth, made of dust; the second man, out of heaven”
1 Cor 15: 47 NT
“He that cometh from above is above all ... and what he hath seen and heard, that he testifieth; and no man receiveth his testimony. He that hath received his testimony hath set to his seal that God is true”
Everything that God is doing has reference to Christ, Col 3: 11. The Man out of heaven is the only man God takes account of now. He is first, and then “heavenly things”. He introduces them. In the first creation the “things” were first, then the man (Adam). Now, the Man is first (Christ), and then the things of that man (heavenly things) are made known by the Spirit of that Man sent down and given by Christ. Hence the Spirit of the Son, compare 1 Cor 2: 10, 11, 12. All heaven was moved and humanity affected by the incoming of the man of purpose and counsel!
1. He taketh away the sin of the world.
2. He baptiseth with the Holy Ghost.
Not only has this come to pass, but there are men on earth who are of His order, and who are (as He was personally) to God’s present and eternal pleasure and delight! This, too, has become the object of present interest in heaven, Eph 3: 10-13; John 20: 17. In this regard “heavenly things” have come to pass, and both for God and man, and these only obtain now, and the man in whom they obtain. “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new”, and the witness is the Spirit on earth.
That there should be for God a Man down here, “the Christ, who is God over all”, yet a Man, to whom sin and death and judgment, the common condition and lot of the first man, cannot possibly be attached, and who was characterised by the abiding presence in Him of the Holy Ghost, and that there should be an order of men now on earth before God similarly blest (John 20: 17 and 22), “heavenly things”. The man under probation is the subject (save with prophetic utterances) of the Old Testament, and the man of purpose and counsel is the subject of the New Testament. These two appear to me to be the subjects of the two books that we call the Bible.
This incoming of the second man “out of heaven” has set on earth men of His order, in the power of the Spirit. The Lord, as man, was consciously in the delight and favour of God on the earth. This was one thing. He was in the relation of Son to the Father also.
These two give us the “earthly things” and the “heavenly things”. By the indwelling Spirit given to men on earth now, we come into the blessing and favour of both earthly things (as the Lord knew them) and heavenly things. The principles which governed the Lord as a man down here operate now and come before us I think pretty fully in Matthew 5, 6 and 7—the sermon on the mount. There were thirty years of His life, as man, of which the history and details are not given to us, but in which God found His own delight in His life down here in the midst of earthly things. Luke 2: 14 gives us this, in result, and Matthew the governing principles of that blessed life (the antitype of the meat offering of the Old Testament).
LIGHT has come into the world. The Man “out of heaven” is the Man of purpose and counsel—“God manifest in flesh”. He is opposed on earth by the spirit of the lawless man, developed in opposition to all God’s purposes, Acts 7: 51.
This resistance against Christ and the presence of the Holy Ghost is the active but covert opposition of Satan as an angel of light, the spirit which now worketh in the children of disobedience. The Holy Spirit meets this resistance and overcomes it (1 John 2: 20, 27), and is the hindrance to the overwhelming of every man in the religious delusion and opposition of Satan, who is making everything of the first man.
At the end of Judges we read that every man did that which was right in his own eyes. This is lawlessness. In the first Book of Samuel this has come into the priestly family in Eli’s sons—that is, into the priesthood. Then God interferes. He brings in His prophet, priest and king. He hears the prayer of the barren woman, the remnant, for the “man child” CHRIST, who is “ever to abide” before Him, and He judges Hophni and Phinehas, speaks of a faithful priest, and Eli dies. Samuel is the ‘prophet’ after Moses. Saul is the ‘lawless man’, the people’s choice, not God’s, and this is the rejection of God and of His prophet. Saul, doubly guilty, usurps priestly nearness and refuses to cut off Amalek, the man of the flesh. He is then rejected, and the one “after God’s own heart” is brought in—the anointed David. Thereon the Spirit of the Lord comes on David, but leaves Saul. In the Man “out of heaven” all this has already taken place. An evil spirit from God now afflicts the lawless man everywhere, who seeks to kill David, and goes swiftly to his doom from bad to worse. Such is this day in which we live, but I would trace it in these two books with the light of 1 Pet 1: 10, 11, 12.
Kingston-on-Thames
From Mutual Comfort—vols 3 & 5, 1910 & 1912
