We Beheld His Glory # 67

The Holy Spirit's Work In Relation to Christ (continued)

The Judgment Question

How wonderful are these simple though comprehensive formulas. 

Here the tremendous field of judgment is covered in one concise phrase: "Because the prince of this world has been judged." What does that mean?

Well, in God's thought and intention there is only one prince for this world. But another, a false prince, a usurper, a rival, has gained a position of lordship, and this by man's assent or acceptance.

"The whole world lieth in the wicked one."

But in the Cross of Christ this other has been judged, condemned, and 'cast out." By that Cross his casting out of Heaven has been followed by his casting out of the earth - in the thought and rights of God for His Son.

From the day the Spirit, when Jesus began to be preached as "Lord," "prince and Saviour" (the great Apostolic theme), judgment is gathered into the matter of a deliberate choice of sides. In Christ judgment has been finished. "Out of Christ" means "in satan": therefore in the realm of double judgment - exclusion both from God's kingdom here and from Heaven.

So judgment is solely a matter of taking sides, but it is Christ again who is the deciding Factor.

Thus the Spirit has as His ground the Person and work of Christ, in their respective meanings for the believer and the world.

This may be an added factor in that hostility to which the Lord so much referred at that time, and which was so satanically manifested after the Spirit had come.

But there is much comfort for believers in this chapter. The Spirit who was in the Lord Jesus is promised and given to all who will receive Him. All the possibilities  and potentialities of His indwelling, for progressive and never-ending knowledge of Christ's fullness, and for service, are for those who will take the ground of the new dispensation - the ground of Christ's absolute Lordship, His perfected work and who live abidingly in and by the Spirit.

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 68 - "The Prayer Beside the Altar")