Life On The Highest Plane
No man can live unto himself. Every man has a corporate as well as an individual life. God has ordained that we live in families, neighborhoods, nations and races, nevertheless the whole human race is a unit and each person is a unit within a unit.
God intended that between the units in this vast organism there should be perfect adjustment. Godliness, holiness and righteousness were the fundamentals upon which God meant human society to be built.
But sin entered and as we have seen, cosmos became chaos. Maladjustment distorted every relationship; first, between God and man; second, within man's own being; third, between man and man. In God's original creation the divine order was God, others, oneself. Sin completely reversed this. Selfishness supplanted love. Today the whole fabric of human society is threatened. Family life is being rent in twain by divorce of parents and disobedience of children; communities are agog with frightful crimes and civic corruptions; nations and races are at war at heart, if not in fact. Family, civic, national and international life is shot through and through with division.
The only hope for readjustment within human society rests in a return to God's original order. In Christ and in Him alone can man come into a right relationship with God, with himself and with his fellow men. In Christ all dislocations in relationships may be set right and there may be a reproduction of moral order in which the processes of disintegration and degeneration may cease. Life on the highest plane both demands and provides for such readjustment.
The Christian life is a fellowship which is rooted in faith and nurtured by love. The soil out of which it springs is faith in God. The atmosphere is which it thrives is love for God, out of which is begotten love toward man. This divine order is irreversible. It is impossible for one to have a love for his fellow man with sufficient power to conquer the innate selfishness of his own heart apart from faith in God. It is utter folly to preach "the brotherhood of man" to those who do not know "the Fatherhood of God" through a new birth based on faith in the cleansing blood of a Saviour.
Primacy is always given in Scripture to man's relationship to God; his relationship to man is secondary and dependent. Godliness is an essential precedent to righteousness. When men have become children of God through faith in Jesus Christ then they become brothers in the Lord. This is the only "Fatherhood of God" and "brotherhood of man" which Scripture sanctions and which works out in practical experience. After Paul calls himself Christ's apostle then he calls himself Timothy's brother.
Colossians 1:4, "Since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus, and of the love which we have to all the saints."
Philemon 5, "Hearing of thy love and faith, which thou hast toward the Lord Jesus, and toward all saints."
Colossians 1:1, "Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, and Timotheus our brother."
Let us then consider the Christian's corporate relationships in their divinely appointed order.
The Spiritual Man's Relationship to God
Life on the highest plane demands a radical reversal in man's affections. The natural man lives unto himself because he loves self supremely; the spiritual man lives unto God because he loves God supremely.
2 Timothy 3:2, 4, "For men shall be lovers of their own selves ... Traitors, headly, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God."
2 Corinthians 5:15, "And he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again."
God's love bridged the gulf between the natural and the spiritual man. "God so loved that he gave his only begotten Son." His gift was the measure of His love. He gave His best, His all. He gave the costliest gift in His treasure house, the crown jewel of Heaven. Such love comprehended by faith conquers the rebellion of the will and constrains the heart to love Him who first so loved us. Our love for Him is rooted in His love for us.
1 John 4:9-10, "In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him ... Herein is love not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins."
1 John 4:19, "We love him, because he first loved us."
The spiritual man not only loves God more than he loves himself but also more than he loves any other one. His love for God is paramount. It is so far above the love he has even for his own kith and kin that it is in a class by itself.
Matthew 22:37-38, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment."
Matthew 10:37, "He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me."
When the Christian becomes a son in God's family thereafter his first filial obedience and love is to be given to his heavenly Father. This does not mean for one moment that God discounts the human love of parent for child or child for parent or friend for friend. On the contrary God commands both parental and filial love, and experience proves that when one loves God supremely all human love is both enhanced and enriched. To the heavenly Father His child not only owes the gift of physical life through creation but he owes the still more priceless gift of spiritual life through re-creation. This makes him far more of a debtor to God than he is even to his earthly parents, and parents and children alike should acknowledge with joy the primacy of their relationship to God.
~Ruth Paxson~
(continued with # 2)
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