His Resurrection and Our Life
His Resurrection and Our Life
His Resurrection Declared (Mark xvi. 5–8)
Our Eternal Life (John xx. 22)
His Resurrection Destiny (Luke xxiv. 26)
Our Experimental Life (Philippians iii. 10; Romans vi. 23)
His Resurrection Deity (John xx. 17)
Our Entire Life (Colossians iii. 1–4)
We must always distinguish between the truths we receive as revelations and what we experience of God’s grace. We experience the wonderful reality of God’s salvation and sanctification in our actual lives, but we have also to receive into our minds and souls Divine revelations which we cannot experience. We cannot experience Jesus Christ rising from the dead; we cannot experience His Destiny or His Deity, but we must understand where the regenerating forces in our lives come from. The New Testament insists on an instructed mind as well as a vital experience.
His Resurrection Declared
“And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted. And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: He is risen; He is not here: behold the place where they laid Him” (Mark xvi. 5–8).
Our Lord died and was buried and He rose again, and this is the declaration of the Resurrection in all its incredibleness. Any question that arises in connection with the Resurrection arises in the minds of those who do not accept the necessity of being born from above. There is always a quarrel between our common sense and the revelations made in God’s Book. We must lose our soul in order to find it. We have to be born from above and receive Holy Spirit into our spirit, and then begin to construct another soul, or way of reasoning, and to do this we must accept not only the facts that come to us through our common sense, but the facts that come by revelation. We say seeing is believing, but it is not. We must believe a thing is possible before we should believe it even though we saw it (John xx. 29).
Our Eternal Life
“And when He had said this, He breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost ” (John xx. 22).
Eternal life is the gift of the Lord Jesus Christ. “He that believeth on Me hath everlasting life (John vi. 47), i.e., the life He manifested in His human flesh when He was here, and says Jesus, ‘Ye have not (that) life in yourselves’ ” (John vi. 53; R.V.). His life is not ours by natural birth, and it can only be given to us by means of His Cross. Our Lord’s Cross is the gateway into His life; His Resurrection means that He has power now to convey that life to us (John xvii. 2).
The onslaught of Satan in Gethsemane was that Jesus Christ would never get through His agony as Son of Man. As Son of God, Satan could not prevent His getting through, but his challenge was that he would prevent Jesus Christ bringing one soul through with Him—and Satan was hopelessly defeated. By the death of the Son of Man upon the Cross, the door is opened for any individual to go straight into the presence of God; and by the Resurrection our Lord can impart to us His own life. When we are born from above we receive from the risen Lord His very life, our human spirit is quickened by the incoming of the life of God. That is the marvel of the power of the Lord Jesus Christ through His resurrection. “I would know Him in the power of His resurrection” (Philippians iii. 10, Moffatt).
Holy Spirit, Salvation, and Eternal Life are interchangeable terms. ‘Holy Spirit’ is the experimental name for eternal life working in human beings here and now. The only thing that makes eternal life actual is the entrance of the Holy Spirit by commitment to Jesus Christ. Our beliefs will mock us unless something comes into us from God, because nothing has any power to alter us save the incoming of the life of God. The Holy Spirit is the One Who makes experimentally real in us what Jesus Christ did for us. The Holy Spirit is the Deity in proceeding power Who applies the Atonement to our experience. Jesus Christ came to redeem us; to put us right with God; to deliver us from the power of death; to reveal God the Father; and when we receive the Holy Spirit He will make experimentally real in us all that Jesus Christ came to do. The great need for men and women is to receive the Holy Spirit. Our creeds teach us to believe in the Holy Spirit; the New Testament says we must receive Him (Luke xi. 13). Are you powerless in your life? Then, for Christ’s sake, get at Reality! Ask God for the Holy Spirit, i.e., His eternal life, and you will begin to manifest in your mortal flesh the life of Jesus. One day we shall have a body like His body, but we can know now the efficacy of our Lord’s resurrection. We can receive the Holy Spirit and experimentally know His salvation.
His Resurrection Destiny
“Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory ?” (Luke xxiv. 26).
The sufferings of Jesus Christ were not an accident, they are what He came for; He knew that His life was to be a ransom for many. The men who do not suffer in this world are not worth their salt. The finest men and women suffer, and the devil uses their sufferings to slander God. God is after one thing—bringing many sons to glory, and He does not care what it costs us, any more than He cared what it cost Him. God has taken the responsibility for the possibility of sin, and the proof that He did so is the Cross. He is the suffering God, not One Who reigns above in calm disdain. “Though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered.” He did not learn to be a Son, but because He was a Son, He deliberately chose to obey God through suffering. His resurrection destiny is to suffer and to enter into glory in order that He may bring “many sons unto glory.”
We must beware lest we put the emphasis of strain and suffering on the wrong thing. Salvation and eternal life are easy for us to obtain because of what they cost God. If we find it difficult to come to God, it is because we will try to drag our human pride through. If we will only come with the simplicity of a child, there is no need for any agony at all; we can receive the marvellous revelation of salvation and experience the impartation of the life of the risen Lord Jesus; but self-realisation and self-interest and sin must all be renounced. Never sympathise with a soul who finds it difficult to get through to God. It is perilously easy to sympathise with Satan instead of with God (Matthew xvi. 23). No one can be more tender to men and women than God. We are slandering God if we sympathise with the wilfulness of a person and think how difficult God makes it for him. It is never hard to get to God unless our wilfulness makes it hard.
Our Lord rose to an absolutely new life, to a life He did not live before He was Incarnate, He rose to a life that had never been before. There had been resurrections before the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but they were all resuscitations to the same kind of life as heretofore. Jesus Christ rose to a totally new life, and to a totally different relationship to men and women. The resurrection of Jesus Christ grants Him the right to give His own destiny to any human being—viz., to make us the sons and daughters of God. His Resurrection means that we are raised to His risen life, not to our old life. “Like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life ... we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection” (Romans vi. 4–5).
Our Experimental Life
“That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death ” (Philippians iii. 10). (See also Romans vi. 23.)
Eternal life is not a present given to me by God, it is Himself. “The gift of God,” not from God. How is the life of God going to work out in us? First of all, it will manifest itself in our mortal flesh in the way of death. The surging life of God instantly hates to death the things which have nothing to do with God. We experience exhaustion, a drying up of the springs of intellectual and physical life, the reason being that God is teaching us that all our life is now in the hand of God. Then the Holy Spirit will experimentally reveal the power of His resurrection. If we are right with God, physical exhaustion will always bring its own recuperation. The exhaustion does not tell because He recuperates all the time. It is not a question of being buoyed up with excitement, it is a superabounding supply of life all the time. If we live in touch with our Lord’s life experimentally, we realise that our bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost. This comes to us first as a revelation, not as something to be experienced only. If we live on the experimental side alone, we shall get distracted. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ has given Him the right, the authority, to impart the life of God to us, and our experimental life must be constructed on the basis of His life. “All my fresh springs are in Thee” (Psalm lxxxvii. 7). Watch the things that exhaust you, and you will find you are doing something outside God’s arrangement for you. There are things for which His life supplies no energy and we get spent right out. If we are doing things inside God’s arrangement for us, the natural exhaustion is so quickly recuperated by the resurrection life of Jesus that we do not feel the exhaustion. We must find out whether we are instructing ourselves in the Christian revelation. Do we know the power of His resurrection? are we making that the centre of our profound life? If we are, the experimental realty will work all through.
His Resurrection Deity
“Jesus saith unto her, Touch Me not; for I am not yet ascended to My Father: but go to My brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto My Father, and your Father; and to My God, and your God ” (John xx. 17).
The risen Lord as Son of Man is talking to a particular representative of humanity, the woman out of whom He had cast seven devils. Our Lord is the same, yet so indefinably altered by His death and resurrection that Mary did not recognise Him at first. Then when He said to her, “Mary,” she flung herself at His feet with a complete thrill of expectancy—‘He is back again, and all things will be well!’ Mary had to learn that the relationship she was now to be in to her Lord was not one that could be discerned by her natural senses, but a relationship based on an impartation of life from Himself. “I ascend unto My Father, and your Father.” It was to be a relationship in which she was made one with Jesus Christ. His Resurrection Deity means that He can take us into union with God, and the way into that relationship of oneness is by the Cross and the Resurrection. The weakest saint can experience the power of the Deity of the Son of God if he is willing to ‘let go.’ The whole almighty power of God is on our behalf, and when we realise this, life becomes the implicit life of the child. No wonder Jesus said—“Let not your heart be troubled”! The characteristic of the saintly life is abandon to God, not a settling down on our own whiteness. God is not making hot-house plants, but sons and daughters of God, men and women with a strong family likeness to Jesus Christ.
Our Entire Life
“If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your attention on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory” (Colossians iii. 1–4).
We starve our minds as Christians by not thinking, and we cannot think as Christians until we are born from above. So many of us have a good spiritual experience, but we have never thought things out on Christian lines. It is just as true that a man may live a Christian life without thinking as that a man may think a Christian life without living it. We have to learn to combine the two, and to do this we must build up our minds on these great truths.
If we have been born from above, we must seek the things that are above. To any one who is not born from above, it sounds mystical and remote, but there is nothing too profound for a saint. We can always know a saint because he discerns the revelations of God, while the unspiritual man who has not been born from above looks puzzled. Truth is not discerned intellectually, it is discerned spiritually.
The power of the Resurrection is to work out in these mortal bodies. Provided we are alive when our Lord comes again, we shall be changed, Paul says, and he goes on to expound the marvellous transformation that will take place in a flash in everything to do with the natural.
“Your life is hid with Christ in God.” Christ is our entire life. When once we realise this, certain forms of doubt and perplexity vanish for ever. If we set our affection on things above, those perplexities will never trouble us any more because we know the Lord Jesus, and He is not distracted by these present perplexities. The things that are obscure to the natural man become clear to the penetration of the mind that sets itself on the things above. Such an one does not pretend not to have doubts, we know he has not got them; his is not a stoical calm. The reason is that he has been living for a long time in Colossians iii., the entire life is hid with Christ in God, the whole set of the mind is on the things above, and the things on earth are transfigured.
Thank God that the almighty power of Jesus Christ is for us. All power is vested in Him in heaven and on earth, and He says, “Lo, I am with you all the days.” All the power of the Deity of Christ is ours through His Resurrection.