We Beheld His Glory # 46

The Way From the Fold of Law to the Fold of Grace

What is the way out and the way in? The way out and the way in is Christ's death. "I lay down my life for the sheep." Here it is not so much the sin question that is to the fore, although that lies, of course, at the root of everything. He was "born under the law." His death was to extricate from that fold, that system, that deadly thing that was against us" (Col. 2:14). He laid down His life for the sheep. His death was the way out. The whole of the New Testament afterward bears down upon this, that it is by the death of the Lord Jesus that we are delivered from the bondage of the law - that law which is constantly and eternally battering us with our own sin, breaking and shattering us with our own state. His death is the way out; His resurrection is the way in. "Who according to his great mercy begat us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, unto an inheritance incorruptible" (1 Peter 1:3, 4). So deliverance by the death of Christ is one of the characteristics of the company. They have come into the good and value of the delivering death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus, with all its blessing and enlargement. They stand on that ground.

Let me return to something I said a little earlier, that while individuals, of course, come that way and they must so come - we must recognize that death with the Lord Jesus, and resurrection in union with Him, sees the end of all individualism. God's intention is to bring to an end what is merely individual. There must be an individual entering in, but for it to remain an individual thing is contrary to the meaning of the death of Christ. Right from this time onward, it is seen in this gospel that the full blessing lies on the far side of Jordan. In the Old Testament, the Israelites were a much more integrated people on the other side of the Jordan than they were before; and when you get on the far side of the death of Christ you are immediately found as a part of a people, and not just as individuals.

So it is in the New Testament. You come to Colossians and Ephesians, or to what is represented by those letters. You find immediately that you are "raised together with Him." It is the Church that is in view; you have left merely individual ground, you are now on corporate ground. Christ's death is intended to bring that about. If we have not apprehended that, we are still in the limitation which a merely individual life must know. It is very important for us to recognize that.

It is all a matter of God's purpose. What is God's purpose? What is revealed to be  "the eternal purpose ... purposed in Christ Jesus"? You will find always that the scriptures demand the Church for the eternal purpose; the whole Body which gives Christ the vessel for His collective and corporate expression. That is the way of the eternal purpose, and it is on resurrection ground that we come into it. Therefore that which is only individual goes out with the death of Christ, and in the resurrection of Christ it is found no more in the thought of God. Christ's death is the way out. Christ's resurrection is the way in. That is the principle here enunciated. 

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 47 - "They Know My Voice")