The Secret of His Purpose

Chapter 6: Sons of the Kingdom

In each of the four great figures of the church which must now claim our attention--the new man, the heavenly citizenship, the household of God, and the house of God--there is a very clear and practical expression of the unity which has been Paul's main subject in the preceding verses of chapter two, and also of that mutual responsibility which is implicit in any true oneness and is likewise a mark of the assembly. If, as has already been pointed out, self is the centre of sin, then the opposite of self, subjection, and in mutual subjection, fellowship, must be the centre of salvation; and that subjection to the Lord and His people and fellowship, its outworking, finds its full expression in the church. Being born again is being translated from a realm which is essentially selfish, into a realm which is essentially self-renouncing.

It is this that the assembly pre-eminently reveals, and it is for this reason that the assembly has such an important place in the purpose of God. Not a collection of saved individuals are going to be presented to the Lord in the last day, but the church, as Paul clearly tells us in Ephesians 5:27. Why and how it should be so is, of course, the subject of the epistle, and the great basic factors which compose the assembly, relationship to Christ, subjection, faithfulness, unity and others, Paul comes back to again and again in the course of the letter, approaching them each time from a different standpoint and emphasising and re-emphasising their importance. If, in each of the four figures found in this chapter, the same things are repeatedly stressed, it is the Spirit of God who does the stressing, and we would do well, therefore, to pay heed to the implications of such emphasis.

The new man to whom Paul introduces us in verse fifteen is, in some respects, a figure closely akin to that of the body which we have already touched upon at the end of chapter one. It is also taken up again and further explained in chapter four, verse thirteen. The expression itself, 'one new man' (v. 15) is remarkable. Here is the result of God's unifying those who are in Christ. Paul does not say that God makes of them a very happy company of people who agree very well among themselves. It is not simply that Jew and Gentile are brought to a place of mutual understanding. It is much more than that. It is that there is no Jew or Gentile any longer, no company of individuals, but one new man.

Unity is a term much misused in our modern world, and it has, therefore, in some senses, become inadequate to express what God is really after in the church. The church is the fusion of God's people into one. In His last great prayer our Lord prayed for his disciples and for us, "And the glory which Thou hast given me I have given unto them; that they may be one, even as we are one" (John 17:22). Here is another expression of the oneness of the new man--one as God is one, yet in His oneness remaining three. The trinity will ever remain something beyond the understanding of mortal man while the limitations of body and mind remain, yet we know that these two apparently irreconcilable things combine in the Godhead, God's oneness and God's trinity. Most emphatically we know that God is but one, yet, on the other hand, the personality of Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not swallowed up in one another. It is the same in the church. The varied personalities which God has given to His people are not lost, rather do they find their consummation in their contribution to the great new personality of the new man, the assembly.

A man is not simply body, but the life also to which the body gives expression; so here once more we find Paul's returning to re-emphasise a fact which has already been stressed, that the existence of the church is dependent, not simply upon its outward form, but upon the vitality of the Spirit within. It can never be too strongly or too often emphasised that the imposition of a pattern, or simply the gathering of people together, does not bring the church into being. A church cannot be organised, it has to be born.

The great contrast between the old and the new man is taken up by Paul again in his letter to the Colossians. In ch. 3:9-10 he says, "Lie not one to another; seeing that ye have put off the old man with his doings; and have put on the new man, which is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of Him that created him." The self-seeking old nature is lost in our incorporation in the new man, and, having been born into this new plane of living, we must inevitably grow and develop in it. In the latter verse Paul draws our attention in particular to two things, firstly, the new man's 'development unto knowledge,' and secondly, his likeness to the One who created him.

Many of our individual characteristics are inherited from our forebears. "Like father, like son," says the proverb, and this likeness may be passed on down through the generations. We are begotten of God, and His likeness is passed on to us, not to us as individuals separated from one another, but to us as the new man, the church. It is in the assembly, therefore, that we see the complete image of our Creator. Why this is so is explained for us more fully in the third chapter of Ephesians, so we shall return to the subject in due course.

But let the magnitude of this fact sink into our hearts. God is not content that the church should be merely a pale imitation of His greatness, but that it should be in His very image. "The measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ," is God's purpose (Ephesians 4:13). What could be more clear? "Ah, yes," the wise will remark, "but it is merely an ideal and can never be worked out while man is man." Is not the whole of life a striving after an ideal? and the measure in which we are given over to it will be the measure of our attainment of it. When we really understand the greatness of our inheritance and our right in Christ, we will not be slow to abandon the petty things which prevent our possessing it. Man may still be man, but God is still God, and it is this fact above all that dominates the lives of those who are in Christ and changes also the old man into the new. The trouble is not that the ideal is too high, but that God's people have so often set it aside to wallow in the slough of human personality entanglements and material considerations. "They looked unto Him and were lightened: and their faces shall never be confounded" (Psalm 34:5). Whether or not we enter into the purpose of God is dependent upon the direction in which we are looking. "This is the victory that hath overcome the world, even our faith" (I John 5:4).

Implicit in an understanding of the new man is the thought of progress and development. Admiring friends gather round the new son of the family, and all agree that 'he is just the image of his father.' His father, however, is six feet tall; the little boy has a long way to go before he will be like him in that respect. His father is also a very highly educated man; the son cannot articulate even the simplest of words, and from an educational point of view he knows exactly nothing, yet in some years' time he may well equal his father both in stature and accomplishments. Just as the life of the Spirit in regeneration imbues the believer with a divine potential, so does it imbue the church. The birth of the church does not any more imply perfection than does the experience of the new birth imply immediate maturity in the things of God. The new man has to be born and to grow, and it is this process of development which forms the basis of Paul's thought when he says that the new man 'is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of Him that created him.' Latent within the frame of a new-born babe are all the potentialities of the full-grown and developed man or woman. Latent within the frame of the new-born church, the new man, are all the potentialities of the glory of God. Development there must be with all its attendant disciplines and difficulties, but at every stage it is the character of the divine parent which will shine forth and be ever more clearly seen. The fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23), the character of God in the church, may be expressed in much human limitation, just as a person's expression of hospitality may fall far short of his desire because of the limitations of his circumstances; it is hospitality gracious and unmistakable nevertheless. Similarly, where the church exists God's character cannot be absent. It is there, evident, and growing daily more clear as spiritual weakness gives place to spiritual strength, and human ignorance gives place to spiritual knowledge. One day the 'full grown man' will emerge in the 'measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ' (Ephesians 4:13) but it is here on earth, in the new man, the church, that the birth, the process of growth and development takes place. The assembly is God's spiritual son, a witness to the world of what He is like, and of a hope and purpose higher by far than the thoughts of man.

The second of the figures to which Paul likens the church in chapter two is found in verse nineteen, "But ye are fellow citizens with the saints." In writing to the Philippians he uses a similar expression when he reminds them, "Our citizenship is in heaven" (Philippians 3:20), and Peter uses practically the same metaphor when describing the people of God as 'a holy nation' (I Peter 2:9). Each of these phrases is used to mark the contrast between man as he was in his old unregenerate state, and man as he is in Christ, brought into a new plane of living where the heavenly so completely supersedes the earthly.

But once again the main point of the contrast is the antithesis between the old selfish individualism of human nature, and the corporate responsibility of a spiritual 'nation.' Paul would emphasise that the fact that sin is really dealt with, is demonstrated, and can only be fully demonstrated in the church. Where a person balks at the claims of the fellowship of the saints and, instead, seeks to enjoy the fruits of regeneration in spiritual isolation, there can only be grave doubts as to the nature of his spiritual experience. The life of the Spirit is so completely different, and the very meaning of salvation is that we are translated from that isolation from God brought about by sin, into a heavenly community which owns Him as Lord.

Life in any community entails certain loyalties and responsibilities, and it is our attitude to these that in turn determines our conduct. Our existence as members of a certain class of people, whether nationally, in a given locality, or any otherwise, is a social fact determined for us by our birth, and it is from this related position that the ordinary man of the world adjusts his mode of conduct to meet, as he thinks, the demands of living. His earthly relationships in a particular sphere determine his likes and his dislikes, his joys and his fears, in fact the whole conduct of his livelihood. But in Christ, Paul tells us, we are raised above this, to a plane far higher than an existence conditioned by natural circumstances and earthly loyalties. We now look upon life, not from the point of view of self, or of a particular community or race, but from the point of view of God. The believer is given a new focus to life, a new norm by which to judge. Every action is determined by this great new fact, that he is now a citizen of a heavenly country whose king is Christ. Nor can this loyalty ever be other than in the best interests of all men. "The powers that be are ordained of God," Paul tells the Romans (Romans 13:1). Human government, on every level, is a God-recognised institution, and where it remains true to its legitimate purpose it can never contradict the standards of God by whose ordination it exists, just as individual states in any country cannot have laws which are contrary to the constitution. Loyalty to our heavenly citizenship, therefore, as revealed in the church, offers an infallible rule of conduct in every aspect of living, and a rule which contradicts no other lesser loyalty which is not a usurpation of the rights of God Himself.

This loyalty to Christ is mandatory to every believer, yet not as an imposition upon an unwilling subject. It is the law of the Spirit of life written upon the hearts of God's people. It is part and parcel of regeneration. This leads us naturally to a consideration of the place of law in the fellowship of the church, for the thought of law is inseparable from the thought of an ordered and stable life such as is pictured in our relationship as 'fellow-citizens with the saints' under the kingship of Christ. Yet, on the other hand, "The Jerusalem that is above is free," says Paul to the Galatians (Galatians 4:26), again describing the relationship of grace into which Christ has brought us. Freedom and law, are they not contradictory?

Freedom is one of the great topics of the age in which we live. It embodies the aspirations of nations and individuals alike, yet what freedom really means is probably understood by very few, and the word is used as often as not as little more than a convenient term to cloak the whims of comfort and pleasure-seeking selfish men. What is freedom?

To begin with, the Bible indicates very clearly that no man is free in an absolute sense. As we have already seen, life itself consists not only in the capacity of man to respond, but in his actually responding to things around him. Life means activity; freedom, in an absolute sense, means passivity, inactivity, for once a person acts (that is, responds to either good or evil) he is no longer free, but his life becomes conditioned by the choice he has made. This is the situation in which man finds himself simply because he is man. To remain completely detached from every circumstance is just impossible unless he dies. He is, therefore, inevitably in bondage, either to his own self-interest, or to the interests of God, so whatever we are to understand by freedom must come within the limitations of one or other of these two allegiances. It is this that Paul states when he writes to the Romans about 'being made free from sin, and become servants to God' (Romans 6:22). Freedom from one means bondage to the other. Accept freedom from God and bondage to sin, or freedom from sin and bondage to God. That is the choice that is before us, and there is no third alternative. Just because God is God and man is man, man is in no position to sit in a place of detachment outside God and His creation and claim that he is obliged to choose neither. Yet this is just what man wants to do, and he actually thinks he can do it, so blinded is he by sin and so completely corrupt is his nature. But it is a monstrous deception of his own proud heart. There is no such possibility.

Still the Scripture tells us that the country of our heavenly citizenship, 'the Jerusalem that is above is free.' What is a free country? It is certainly not one without any laws or government; that would mean anarchy and confusion, and would consign everyone to live under the bondage of the unscrupulous. Freedom is the rule of good law. Bondage is the rule of bad law or no law. Were all traffic regulations in a large city to be removed, the result would be chaos. The alternative, which would allow traffic to move freely, is law, and law which is strictly observed. Freedom, in the real and Biblical sense, is impossible apart from law, and the person who is, above all others, free, is the person who is subject to the law of God. Paradoxically, freedom is subjection to Christ, subjection to His Word which is truth, and Christ Himself is both the Word (John 1:1) and the Truth (John 14:6). "If ye abide in my Word, then are ye truly My disciples; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:31-32). Here, then, is the crux of the whole question of freedom: subjection to the truth through the Word.

It is in the assembly where Christ the Word dwells, God's order and standard are revealed, and it is there, therefore, that His people have the opportunity of subjecting themselves to Him, the Word and the Truth, and to one another, in conformity with the law of the Spirit written in their hearts. This is the freedom of the 'Jerusalem that is above,' a recognition of the control of God and a bowing humbly before it.

Citizenship, of course, implies not only a recognition of the head, but in the relationship of the community, a sense of responsibility and subjection to one another. In a well-run state, a good citizen will exemplify the law of the land, and will himself command the respect of others as a person whose word must be given careful heed, and whose life must be accepted as an example. All this has its counterpart in the assembly. Spiritual freedom is dependent upon subjection to the Truth, the Word, and God's Word must be accepted and bowed to wherever it is found.

What is meant when we speak of 'the Word'? Speech, that is, our words, is the one way by which the thoughts of the mind can be fully expressed. A person suffering from some illness may go to a doctor. He is able to tell why he has come and to explain his symptoms. A very small child, on the other hand, cannot, because, not yet having learned to speak, he has no words with which to express himself. If he is a little older he may be able to give some idea of what is wrong with him, but still, his limited vocabulary will mean that the expression of his thoughts is incomplete. Down through the history of the world God has never left Himself without some expression of His mind. The law, the Tabernacle, and the Prophets have all been God's Word to creation, for through them God has revealed His mind to man. All of these, however, were limited expressions. The full expression of God's mind was to come in Christ. He, therefore, was the Word. "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father," said the Lord to Philip (John 14:9). The Bible is the written expression of Christ; for this reason we call it the Word of God. It is also a complete expression of Christ, 'fulfilled' as Paul tells us, through the revelation of the church (Colossians 1:24-25) and is the norm whereby every other expression of Christ must be judged. It is, however, not a dead thing, but something living and vital, and as such, must reproduce itself in the hearts and lives of those in whom it takes root. "The words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life" (John 6:63). It is this great fact that the Lord brings out so clearly in that very familiar parable of the sower. In the account of the parable given by Luke it will be noticed that the seed is explained as 'the Word of God' (Luke 8:11). In the Gospel of Matthew, however, the seed is explained as 'the sons of the Kingdom' (Matthew 13:38). These two interpretations are not contradictory but complementary. They express the fact that through the generation of the Word of God in the heart of man, the Word produces in its own likeness men and women who are themselves an expression of the Word. They in turn are sowed into the field of the world to reproduce after their own kind. The people of God are themselves the Word of God to the extent that Christ is formed in them. Paul gives expression to this same principle when he writes to the Corinthians, "Ye are our epistle, written in our hearts, known and read of all men" (II Corinthians 3:2).

Spiritual freedom is dependent upon subjection to the law of God, the truth, the Word, and to the extent that God's children themselves personify the Word, to that extent is our spiritual freedom dependent upon subjection one to another. "Subjecting yourselves one to another in the fear of Christ," says Paul later on in this same epistle (Ephesians 5:21). Wherever the Word of God is evidenced, be it in the written revelation or in the lives of His people, it must be bowed to with equal reverence. It is very often the refusal to recognise the Word of God in His people, a refusal which can only be born of pride, that is the cause of the bondage and fruitlessness with which assemblies are assailed. Freedom in the heavenly city of the church will become a reality when Peter's exhortation becomes part of our experience, "Gird yourselves with humility to serve one another" (I Peter 5:5).

One other aspect of our relationship as citizens of a heavenly kingdom deserves mention. It emphasises once again the distinction of the people of God from every other earthly society. This separation, as a mark of the church, has already been pointed out, but it is of sufficient importance for Paul to bring it yet once more to our notice, implicit in his mention of our heavenly citizenship.

The people of the world are divided into many nationalities, each with its distinctive features. Ancestry, environment, climate, culture and various other factors have all helped to mould the characteristics of different races, and from the accident of a person's birth in any particular part of the globe he automatically becomes heir to certain physical or temperamental characteristics which immediately distinguish him from a person of other nationality. Our relationship in the kingdom of Christ has brought to bear upon our lives spiritual influences far more powerful than any of the influences of this earthly existence. In fact, "there is a new creation," says Paul (II Corinthians 5:17). A new spiritual race has been brought into existence through the regenerating and unifying power of the Spirit. How can it be other than distinct from all the world around? Nor will this distinction be simply in the church's attempts to be different; it cannot help it. Separation is in its very life, and it is this separation which provides one of the most important aspects of the assembly's testimony upon the earth.

Next: Chapter 7: God's Household and the House