The Great Distinguishing Mark Between a Legal System and A Spiritual Life Is By Direct Revelation of Jesus Christ
Now the Apostle Paul was the greatest teacher of the New Testament time on the matter of the Church. But his knowledge of the Church was the result of his seeing God's Son. You see the simple beginning of it. Jesus said, "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?" Saul might have said, "I am not persecuting you, Lord, I am persecuting these Christians." If he had said that, Jesus would have answered, "It is the same thing. I and these Christians are one body. You cannot touch a member of My Body without touching Me." How true that is in the physical body. You take off your shoes, and you walk across the floor, and you come across a pin, and it pricks your little toe, the farthest, smallest extremity of your whole body. And you quickly lift up your foot. It hurts you. How do you know it hurts you? Because that farthest extremity of your body has a relationship with your head. When you say that has hurt me, you are saying it with your head. You see the point, you cannot touch the remotest part in the human body without touching the head. The whole nervous system of the body is centered in the head. So Jesus would have said, "it is the same thing. Touch one simple child of Mine and you touch Me." I think Saul of Tarsus never got a bigger surprise then h did when Jesus said that. When it was shown to him that to touch any of the Christians on the earth was to touch the glorified Son of God, that was the beginning of his understanding of the Church.
There is nothing legal about that; that is very spiritual. If we really see the Lord Jesus, we shall be emancipated. Some of us have had that experience. We were in legal systems; our horizon was that system. Then the day came when the Lord opened our eyes to really see the significance of Christ. And that whole system fell away as being all nonsense. No, it is not our business to say, "Come out of this and that,and come into this other." The word "must" or "thou shall" does not belong to this realm. That belongs to the old legal system. The "must" becomes a spiritual thing, not a legal thing. We could say of Paul, there was a mighty "must" in his spirit. I have seen the Lord, and I am seeing more and more of what the Lord is, and this is creating in me this great imperative. "This one thing I do, leaving the things which are behind, I press on toward the mark of the prize of the on-high calling." So we do not say, 'Change your system.' But we do say, 'Ask the Lord to reveal His Son in you.' Then the great work of emancipation will begin.
I wonder if you have noted that whenever God made a new move, He always did it on the basis of His Son. Whether that move was a new phase entirely, or the recovering of something that was lost, He always put His Son in the front. The beginning of the Bible is God creating a new world. And He does it all in and through and by His Son. His Son is the Agent, the Instrument and the Pattern of the creation. Later on, when God was making another new move with Abraham, He constituted the life of Abraham upon the basis of His Son. Step by step He brought Abraham right up to the climax. And what was the climax? It was this, "Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, and offer him a sacrifice." That was the climax of Abraham's life. All his life was gathered into that. In that step, Abraham entered right into the heart of God. "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son." The new move of God with Abraham was on the basis of God's Son.
The next great move of God was with Israel, the nation. The nation Israel is in bondage in Egypt. The emancipation of that nation from that bondage was on the basis of That Passover, the blood and the flesh of the Passover Lamb. God had put His Son right at the beginning of the national life. Having gotten them out of bondage on the basis of His Son, He constituted them in the wilderness on the basis of His Son. The tabernacle in the wilderness was a comprehensive and detailed representation of God's Son. Many years later, when that nation had departed from the Lord, and when every appeal to them had failed, God raised up the prophets. Now some prophets prophesied toward the captivity; and some prophesied as to that which looked beyond the captivity. But both of these sets of prophets always kept the Lord Jesus in view. Isaiah fifty-three is the great picture of the suffering Son and Servant of the Lord; and that looked beyond the captivity. You see, the history of these people was based upon the presentation of God's Son.
~T. Austin-Sparks~
(continued with # 8)
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