Understanding May Come After Experience (continued)
Now this is not so much technical matter. It is of very great importance; it is leading up, of course, to concrete examples. I want you to see the order of things. Truth, not by any means understood in its fullness, seen as truth, apprehended by faith in purity of spirit and honesty of heart, producing history; but the Lord, never satisfied that it should stay there, afterward giving a great revelation, which became the teaching, or the doctrine of that history. The Church, in the Book of Acts, did not move, and act, and go, and stay, on the ground of a systematized doctrine of Church order. It moved spontaneously, but afterward you have the explanation of that, and you get a spiritual system of Church doctrine, born out of history, which history was occasioned by truths accepted in purity of spirit by faith. If that order had always been maintained, we should have a very different situation today from what exists. We begin with an ecclesiastical system of Church policy and try to apply it and then get life afterward. The New Testament order is just the opposite; life, history, and then explanation. It is not enough to say: Well, we have the experience and it does not matter about the doctrine. Many say that. This is to preach an experience rather than the truth, something without a foundation in the Word of God for the hearer. "Come to our experience." That may be a tremendous peril. When Peter said, as it is written by him in his first letter: "... ready always to give answer to every man that asketh you a reason concerning the hope that is in you," he used there for the word "reason" the word "logos," and what Peter actually said was: Be ready to give n intelligent account, or narrative, or logical setting forth of the hope that is in you. It is ability to give a logical narrative, setting forth, presentation, account of what is in you.
I think that is enough by way of approaching this matter of great truths and their laws. Now we can pass to the consideration of the first of these great truths, and its law, in the gospel by John.
The First Great Truth: The Kingdom of God
Chapter three. The truth is referred to in verses 3 and 5. "Except a man be born anew [from above] he cannot see the kingdom of God." "Except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." You must remember that this is a great doctrine, the Kingdom of God. It was something that had to be preached. It was an object to be presented. It was something that had to take possession of the interests and concerns of men. Here, strangely enough, and perhaps you might be startled to hear it said, being born anew is not the first thing. The Kingdom of God is the first thing. You will have no interest in being born anew if you have no interest in the Kingdom of God. To bring you to the place where you are concerned about being born anew, you must first of all be brought face to face with the Kingdom of God; you must become interested in it. And so the disciples and the apostles preached the Kingdom of God - in the main sense a synonymous term with the Kingdom of Heaven"; an interchangeable phrase often used for exactly the same thing. They were to preach the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven. Paul himself preached that right up to the end of his imprisonment in Rome, so it is stated in Acts 28.
Briefly then, what is the Kingdom of God? It is not merely a realm, but a state. It is not merely an order of outward things, but an inward state of life. "The kingdom of God is not meat and drink"; "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation." It is not a system which is first imposed from the outside, but it is a kind of nature which is heavenly and of God. If it is a realm, and it is, it is a realm in which a state obtains, and before you can enter the realm you have to enter the state. The Kingdom of God is that which in nature appretains unto God; is, in a word, God-nature, God-likeness, the abbreviation of which is Godliness; that is the Kingdom of God. In that Kingdom nothing which is not God obtains. That is a very far-reaching and utter statement. We shall come back to that in a moment. Just that brief word as to what it is, and what it is not.
The Law of the Kingdom of God
Secondly, then, what is its law? Its law is birth from above. "Except a man be born ..." "Gennethei" means generated from above. It is something more utter than our meaning of birth. Birth with us is the consummation of a process. This is no consummation of a process, it is the original act. The same word is sometimes translated "begotten." Generated from above. Now we have three things in that connection. Firstly, the fundamental difference; secondly, the essence; and thirdly, the basis.
~T. Austin-Sparks~
(continued with # 11 - "New Birth - A Fundamental Difference")
No comments:
Post a Comment