Where to Start These Studies
Where to Start These Studies
1 Corinthians ii. 11–15
FIRST MAN SECOND MAN
1 Corinthians xv. 45–50
ADAM CHRIST
Living Soul, v. 45 Quickening Spirit, v. 45
Natural, v. 46 Spiritual, v. 46
Earthy, v. 47 Heavenly, v. 47
NEW MAN
Saint
Earthy and Heavenly Image, v.48.
Earthy Effaced by Heavenly Image, v. 49.
Divinely Inherited Kingdom of God, v. 50
Christian Psychology is based on the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, not on the knowledge of ourselves. It is not the study of human nature analysed and expounded, but the study of the new life that is born in us through the Redemption of our Lord, and the only Standard of that new life is our Lord Himself; He is formed in us by regeneration (Galatians i. 15–16). We are apt to start with the way we are made naturally and to transfer our reasonings on that to Jesus Christ, inferring that to understand ourselves is to understand Him. In Christian Psychology we have not to introspect as we do in natural psychology; we have to accept the revelations given to us in and through our Lord Jesus Christ; that is, we must take all our bearings from the Son of God, not from our natural wits. We have not to study and understand ourselves; but to understand the manifestation in us of the life of the Son of God Who became Son of Man, the Lord Jesus Christ.
According to the Bible, there are only two Men—Adam and Jesus Christ, and God deals with them as the representatives of the human race, not as individuals. All the members of the human race are grouped round these two Men. The first Adam is called ‘the son of God’; the last Adam is the Son of God, and we are made sons of God by the last Adam. The Christian is neither Adam nor Jesus Christ, the Christian is a new man in Christ Jesus. The first Adam and the last Adam are the only two Men according to God’s norm, and they both came into this world direct from the hand of God.
First Man
Living Soul. “The first man Adam was made a living soul ” (v. 45). Beware of dividing man up into body, soul and spirit. Man is body, soul and spirit. Soul is the expression of man’s personal spirit in his body. Spirit means I, myself, the incalculable being that is ‘me,’ the essence that expresses itself in the soul. The immortal part of a man is not his soul, but his spirit. Man’s spirit is as indestructible as Almighty God; the expression of his spirit in the soul depends on the body. In the Bible the soul is always referred to in connection with the body. The soul is the holder of the body and spirit together, and when the body disappears, the soul disappears, but the essential personality of the man remains. In the resurrection there is another body and instantly the soul life is manifested again (John v. 28–29). It is not a resurrection of spirit, i.e., personality, that never dies, but of body and soul.
A ‘living soul’ means man expressing himself as God designed he should. God created man a splendid moral being, fitted to rule the earth and air and sea, but he was not to rule himself; God was to be his Master, and man was to turn his natural life into a spiritual life by obedience. Had Adam done so, the members of the human race would have gone on developing until they were transfigured into the presence of God; there would have been no death. Death to us has become natural, but the Bible reveals it to be abnormal. Adam refused to turn the natural into the spiritual; he took dominion over himself and thereby became the introducer of the heredity of sin into the human race (Romans v. 12), and instantly lost his control over the earth and air and sea. The entrance of sin means that the connection with God has gone and the disposition of self-realisation, my right to myself, has come in its place.
“For by Him were all things created ...” (Colossians i. 16). Did God then create sin? Sin is not a creation; sin is the outcome of a relationship which God never ordained, a relationship set up between the man God created and the being God created who became the devil. God did not create sin, but He holds Himself responsible for the possibility of sin, and the proof that He does so is in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Calvary is God’s responsibility undertaken and carried through as Redemption. The essential nature of sin is my claim to my right to myself, and when sin entered in, the connection between man and God was instantly severed; at-one-ness was no longer possible.
Natural. “Howbeit that was no first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual” (v. 46). Unless we are born again, we will always be ‘natural’ men. In John iii. our Lord is not talking about sin and hell, He is talking to a religious leader, a clean-living, upright, good, noble man—a natural man—and it was to him that He said—“Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.” The general idea is that a man must be a blackguard before Jesus Christ can do anything for him. The average preaching of the Gospel deals mainly with the scenic cases, with people who have gone through exceptional experiences. None of the early disciples had had these exceptional experiences; they saw in Jesus Christ what they had never seen before—a Man from another realm, and they began to long after what He stood for. We preach to men as if they were conscious of being dying sinners; they are not, they are having a good time, and our talk about being born again is from a domain of which they know nothing. The natural man does not want to be born again.
Earthy. “The first man is of the earth, earthy” (v. 47). This is man’s glory, not his shame, because it is in a creature made of the earth that God is going to manifest His glory. We are apt to think that being made of the earth is our humiliation, but it is the very point that is made much of in God’s word. In the Middle Ages it was taught that sin resided in the actual fleshly body, and that therefore the body was a clog and a hindrance. The Bible says that the body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, not a thing to be despised. Sin is not in having a body and a nature that needs to be sacrificed; sin is in refusing to sacrifice them at the call of God. Sin is a disposition which rules the body, and regeneration means not only that we need not obey the disposition of sin, but that we can be absolutely delivered from it (Romans vi. 6).
Second Man
Quickening Spirit. “The last Adam was made a quickening spirit” (v. 45). Jesus Christ came into the human race from the outside, and when we are born again, His life comes into us from the outside. Jesus Christ is the normal man, and in His relationship to God, to the devil, to sin and to man we see the expression in human nature of what He calls ‘eternal life.’ We try to enter the life of Jesus in the wrong way. We do not enter into His life by imitation: we enter into it by its entering into us by means of His death. Jesus Christ gives us His life, viz., Holy Spirit. When we ask God for the Holy Spirit, we receive the very nature of God, Holy Spirit. We become regenerate, born from above, by the gift of life from the last Adam, then we have to live in obedience to that Spirit which has come into our spirit.
The records in the Gospels are given, not so much that we might understand the Person of our Lord from the natural standpoint, but that we might understand how to exhibit His life in us when we are born from above. We have to take our instructions for this from Jesus Christ. The danger is lest we praise God’s salvation and sovereign grace while we refuse to manifest His salvation in our human nature.
Spiritual. “Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual” (v. 46). That which is not earthy, but in accordance with the nature of spirit. There are counterfeit spiritualities, but the spirituality of Jesus Christ is a holy spirituality. Jesus Christ worked from a spiritual standpoint, the Spirit of God so indwelt Him that His spirituality was manifested in His ordinary soul life.
Heavenly. “The second man is the Lord from heaven” (v. 47). The Second Man is the Son of God historically manifested, and the prophecy of what the human race is going to be. In Him we deal with God as Man, the God-Man, the Representative of the whole human race in one Person. Jesus Christ is not a Being with two personalities; He is Son of God (the exact expression of Almighty God), and Son of Man (the presentation of God’s normal man). As Son of God, He reveals what God is like (John xiv. 9); as Son of Man, He mirrors what the human race will be like on the basis of Redemption—a perfect oneness between God and man (Ephesians iv. 13).
New Man
Earthy and Heavenly Image. “As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy: and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly” (v. 48). The ‘natural’ has not life in itself, therefore we must be born from above. To be born from above means that we are lifted into heavenly places in our personal spirit by the Holy Spirit Who comes into us, He quickens us all through. The Holy Spirit does in us what Jesus Christ did for us. Holy Spirit is essential Deity, and He energises our spirit and presences us with Deity as our Lord was presenced. Holy Spirit never becomes our spirit, He quickens our spirit, and instantly we begin to express a new soul.
When God’s Spirit comes into our personality, our soul life begins to be upset, and the bodily life often gets disorganised. Health is simply the balance of our bodily life with external circumstances, anything that upsets the equilibrium on the inside upsets the bodily equilibrium on the outside, consequently when a man is convicted of sin, his ‘beauty consumes away like a moth’ (Psalm xxxix. 11). Beauty means the perfectly ordered completeness of a man’s nature. A man into whom the Spirit of God has entered is for a while out of harmony. The Spirit of God brings upset and conviction, He throws light on what is dark, He searches the recesses of the disposition; consequently the preaching of the Gospel, while it awakens an intense craving, awakens an equally intense resentment. Conviction of sin means that we realise that our natural life is based on a disposition that will not have Jesus Christ. If the man will obey the Holy Spirit, the new balance of holiness will be set up, the balance of his disposition with the law of God. Then he must obey God’s will in his body, and this will mean crucifying the flesh with its affections and lusts (Galatians v. 24).
Earthy Effaced by Heavenly Image. “And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly ” (v. 49). Have you never seen the earthy effaced by the heavenly? Watch the face of a man or woman who has been born again and who is going on with God; there is a change in the features which cannot be defined. The explanation of it is that when God makes us all over again, our bodies are moulded by the new Spirit within and begin to manifest that Spirit (2 Corinthians v. 17). When we receive the Holy Spirit, He lifts us into the realm where Jesus Christ lives, and all things become new. We cannot estimate Jesus Christ along the natural line, He does not belong to this order of things, and He says that if we want to belong to His order we must be born from above (John iii. 3, 5). Tolstoi taught the principles of Jesus, but he ignored the need to be born again. Let a man receive the Holy Spirit, and Jesus Christ will do in him all that he ever imagined He would do, and he will find that it works all the time.
Nothing is born without pain, and a man cannot be born into the Kingdom of God without pain. He must have his conscience and his mind readjusted, and this will mean pain. Redemption makes a man right for heaven, but there is much more in it than that. New birth has to do with being of value to God in this present order of things.
Divinely Inherited Kingdom of God. “Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption ” (v. 50). The characteristics of the natural man, apart from sin, are independence and individuality. Individuality is the strong and emphatic and somewhat ugly husk that guards the personal life. Individuality is a right characteristic in a child, but in a man or woman it is not only objectionable but dangerous, because it means independence of God as well as of other people, and independence of God is of the very nature of sin. The only way we can get rid of the pride of individuality and become one with Jesus Christ is by being born from above.
Sin dwells in human nature, but the Bible makes it very clear that it is an abnormal thing, it has no right there, it does not belong to human nature as God designed it. Sin has come into human nature and perverted and twisted it. The Redemption of God through our Lord Jesus Christ delivers human nature from sin, and then begins the possibility of the manifestation of the life of Jesus in our mortal flesh. We are saved by God’s grace, but, thank God, we have something to do. We must take care to meet God’s supernatural work of grace by our human obedience. When we have been delivered from sin, the characteristics of our natural life have to be sacrificed, not murdered, not denied in the sense of being ignored, but sacrificed, that is, transformed into agreement with the heavenly by obedience (Ephesians iv. 23). We are saved from sin and readjusted to God, but we are still human beings, and we have to take the trouble to actually prove what God has really done in us. God never saves men and women the trouble of manifesting the fact that He has made them His sons and daughters. We begin all right, but it is easy to get switched off. If we do not continue to live in the right place, we will get back into ‘Adam’ sympathies. It is on ‘Adam’ sympathies that much of our Christian work is based, not on sympathy with Jesus Christ, the last Adam. Satan’s temptations of our Lord were based on sympathy with the first Adam—‘Put men’s needs first.’ Jesus Christ says—‘Do not think first of the needs of the people; think first of the commands of God’ (Mark xii. 29–31).
Natural individuality holds strongly to natural relationships. The natural relationships on which individuality is based are—father, mother, brothers and sisters, husband and wife, children, self-interest. These are the relationships with which our Lord says we are likely to clash if we are going to be His disciples. If the clash comes, He says it must be instant obedience to Him (Luke xiv. 26). Our obedience to Jesus Christ is going to cost other people a great deal, and if we refuse to go on because of the cost to them, or because of the stab and the jeer, we may find that we have prevented the call of God coming to other lives; whereas if we will go through with God, all these natural relationships will be given to our credit spiritually in the final wind-up.