Into the Heart of God # 8

Oneness With God In the Heavenly Nature of Everything

Hebrews 11:8-10; 13-16

We have seen that the first crisic [crisis] step toward the ultimate entering the heart of God was when Abraham repudiated the old world. When God said to him: "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house" (Genesis 12:1), it was God's repudiation of the old world. Therefore, the first step toward the full entering into the heart of God is our oneness with God in leaving the world behind.

Then we saw that when that step had been taken, the journey was not at an end. There was another great crisic step to be taken, because Abraham's father, brother and nephew had gone out with him, although God had said: "Get thee out ... from thy kindred, and from thy father's house." That next step, then, was separation from the natural life, what the Apostle Paul called "our old man". "Our old man was crucified with Him (Christ)" (Romans 6:6 ... "Seeing that ye have put off the old man with his doings" (Colossians 3:9).

Now we come to the third phase of this spiritual journey, which is oneness with God in the heavenly nature of everything. Perhaps this is where we ought to read the verses we have already read, for they so clearly set forth the heavenly nature of the journey which Abraham was taking. Leaving for the moment the mistakes that he made because of the difficulties of this way, we look at it as a whole, and it is very comforting to notice that the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews, when speaking about Abraham, never mentions his faults. You have to go back to the Old Testament to find those, and we will do that presently.

First of all, however, let us look at it through the eyes of this writer of the Letter to the Hebrews. Of course, we cannot fully appreciate the meaning of what is written here, for we are not Abraham and have not got his background, but, even if we did understand it all, it is a very wonderful thing that Abraham did. God must have done a very great work in the heart of this man!

Abraham was born in a great city and he lived there for over sixty years, which is the greater part of any life in our time. We have seen that Ur of the Chaldees was a wonderful city. It was set in a very wonderful civilization, and it was there that Abraham was born and brought up. We could say that the city was in his very blood. He was not only in the city - the city was in him. Now he comes right out of that city and is brought into the country of Canaan - and God gave him not one foothold in that country. It was a good country, too; not a country to be despised, by any means, and in it there were a number of cities. You may think that Sodom and Gomorrah were not much in the way of cities and that Abraham had very little difficulty in refusing them, but there were other cities not as bad as they were. At any rate, the other cities might have suited him, but although he had been such a man of the city all his life, he never entered into one of those cities to become a citizen. Whether they might have been desirable from the standpoint of the natural man or not, and whether it might have been quite a good thing to take possession of some part of that country or not, Abraham neither took possession of the land nor of one city all his life. We have read that he was a sojourner in the land, living in tents, moving up and down the country and never far from a city, but although the country and the cities were there, he looked for "a" city and for a heavenly country.

God had done something very deep in this man's heart. If Abraham had looked at the country as his nephew Lot did, he might have said: 'Well this is quite good enough. Let us settle down here.' That is what Lot did, but Abraham looked at the country and said: 'No, this is not it. This does not answer to something that has been done in my heart. God has done something in me that makes me unable to settle down here.' The word is" "He looked for the city ... whose builder and maker is God ... They desire a better country, that is, a heavenly," and then the writer of this Letter to the Hebrews gathers it all up into this: "He (God) hath prepared for them a city."

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 9)