I continue this afternoon to explore some of
the depths and fullness of that little fragment
in the letter to the Hebrews, chapter 12,
verse 22.
Ye are coming to Zion.
It is common knowledge that this document called
the letter to the Hebrews marks the transition
from one dispensation to another, one order, system
and economy to an entirely different one.
From all that was temporal and earthly, material,
of God's ways, God's means in Israel, to
the spiritual counterpart of that as it relates
to this dispensation and to the Church.
It is common knowledge that this town, Zion,
is inclusive of all that was in that
economy.
It came to sum up everything from the
day of Israel's going forth from Egypt.
Then the vision was brought fully into view
of their being brought in and planted in
the mountain of his inheritance.
All that was subsequent to that found its
deposit and consummation in what is called Zion.
All that is taken up in a spiritual
way and made the heritage of the Church.
Our heritage, the heritage of faith.
Ye are coming to Zion.
We have been, as I have said, seeking
to explore and exploit the fullnesses of that
heritage.
We just take one more fragment of that
this afternoon.
We have, for our basic word, fragment in
the 132nd Psalm.
Psalm 132, verse 13.
The Lord hath chosen Zion.
He hath desired it for his habitation.
This is my resting place forever.
Here will I dwell for I have desired
it.
Of all the full statements regarding Zion in
that psalm, the fragment for our present occupation
is, The Lord hath chosen Zion.
In the very blood of the true Israelite
is the element of selection and election.
That is, of a difference and a destiny.
Every true Israelite has that in his blood.
It is a part of his very being,
of his constitution.
The deepest thing in him, in his consciousness,
in his very makeup, is that he is
something different and that he has a particular
destiny.
It has become customary to refer to Israel
as the chosen people or God's chosen people.
And that is the consciousness of the Israelite,
chosen by God, distinguished by God.
In the appointment of God, apart for some
particular purpose.
That is, in his bloody sense of destiny.
These two things go together, difference and destiny,
apartness and purpose.
I say it's a constituent of their very
being.
They can't help themselves.
It just comes up.
You meet it.
Sometimes it shows itself in arrogance, independence, superiority,
and in many other ways.
But there it is.
They just cannot help themselves.
That's how they are made.
They are different and they know it.
And there is something which is bound up
with that difference in the nature of purpose,
destiny, which is their heritage.
And this sense of destiny has always been
a tremendous factor in their history.
A tremendous factor in their endurance, in something
which has enabled them to endure.
And God only knows what they've had to
endure.
In suffering, in work, in vocation, it's
been a potent factor.
In their survival, their very survival.
When that consciousness was alive, they were in
strength.
When that consciousness faded, passed under some cloud
of doubt and question, they lost its keenness,
they were in weakness.
Their strength or their weakness related to the
strength or weakness of this one thing.
This sense of calling, this sense of vocation,
this sense of destiny.
When they were in right relationship with God,
that consciousness was radiant.
It was the dominant element in their life.
It was a powerful motive and principle.
When their relationship with God was not right,
then that consciousness faded and ceased to be
a motive.
They hung their hearts upon the willow, then,
and ceased to sing the songs of Zion.
Zion, you see, contains this very element and
principle and dynamic of destiny, of purpose, of
calling.
In the Psalms, this is regnant.
We have read a specimen this afternoon.
This glory of Zion, this glory of Zion's
calling, purpose, choosing, election, destiny, it is regnant
in the Psalms.
People are in state of tremendous buoyancy there,
because Zion is unfathomable and dim.
In the prophets, it is latent, or even
absent, so that it became the chief vocation
and purpose of the prophets to recover that
very thing.
And the voice of the prophet is always
tuned to that one note.
My servant, whom I have chosen, mine elect,
in whom my soul delighteth.
I have chosen him.
Thou art my chosen.
See, that's the note of the prophets.
You look again at Isaiah 43.
You find that that is the supreme note
there.
Thus said the Lord, thy redeemer.
Thy redeemer.
And their redemption goes hand in hand with
this reassurance.
I have chosen them.
And now that all relate in that half
of the Bible to the earthly people and
to the earthly Zion.
We hear coming back to us from this
writer in the New Testament.
Ye are come to Zion.
Not that one, but to another one.
A superior transcendent Zion.
The heavenly Jerusalem.
The spiritual Zion.
Ye are come to Zion.
And coming to Zion, amongst all the other
things that it means, means coming to that
very thing.
Coming to the eternal counterpart of the temple.
That divine choosing.
That divine electing.
That divine calling.
That divine, that heavenly destiny.
We find this made clear in the New
Testament in two ways.
Firstly, in New Birth.
If it was true that in the very
birth, that is in the very blood and
constitution of the Israelite, this sense of vocation
and destiny was so strong, so powerful.
That is true in the New Birth of
the Child of God.
It is there as a great factor, present.
But in birth as a general principle.
We do not define it in this way.
We do not give it this kind of
definition in words.
But when it is put to us in
this way, yes that is just what we
know.
That when we were born again, when we
were born again, we immediately became conscious of
their being after all some purpose in our
being on the earth.
It was then that life took on its
real meaning.
Whatever we had thought and felt about life
up to that time, now we become conscious
of there being some meaning about life of
which we were never conscious before.
We just feel now, now we've begun to
live.
And now, life has got a meaning.
A purpose.
I say that is there as a general
principle in the very constitution of the New
Birth.
It's a test as to the reality of
the New Birth.
It's a testimony to a very great fact.
That somewhere behind our birth, all unknown, beyond
our understanding and comprehension, there is a desire.
There is a purpose.
We are no accident.
There's a meaning.
I say it's, if I may use this
as a spiritual, it's in our blood.
My New Birth.
That of course is open to your attesting.
You know it's true.
It is at least, at least as potent
a reality of act in the birth of
the child of God, I think, as ever
it was in a Jew.
Your New Birth has not brought that.
Not so that you can put it in
the words, in the form in which I
have put it, but something that you know
to be true.
That life has only just begun.
And purpose has only just come in.
The sense of destiny has only just arisen.
If that is not true of your conversion,
then you've missed something.
You've missed something.
Because it is, I say, a blood constituent
of the new generation.
It's there as a general principle in New
Birth.
And that is the meaning of being born
anew.
But then, the New Testament goes on to
show us that a life in the spirit,
which after all is the enlargement, the fullness
of the meaning of New Birth.
A life in the spirit becomes intelligent, concerning
this matter of purpose and destiny and difference.
Intelligent and specific.
Intelligent, I mean, we come to know what
Paul has spoken of about having been chosen
in him before the foundation of the world.
What Peter meant about the church when he
said, It's only another word, another English word
for the same, original.
Chosen, chosen, elect.
We come intelligently to understand that now we
are somehow chosen by God.
Before we had a being that has been
introduced to us at our New Birth, we
become aware of it, we begin to understand
something of what that means.
God has chosen us.
We can understand what the Lord Jesus meant
when he said, He did not choose me,
but I chose you.
I chose you.
This is something that God has done for
which there is no accounting on any other
ground than on the ground that God did
it.
It's God's sovereign act.
We begin to understand that it is so.
And intelligently we are able to grasp more
and more the teaching, especially through Paul, concerning
this matter of election.
Choosing.
And calling.
Calling.
What a favorite word of Paul's that was.
Calling.
Called according to his purpose.
Called.
Purpose.
According to his purpose.
The purpose of him.
And so on.
These are great words.
Which are all gathered into the one word,
Destiny.
And a life in the Spirit, a life
in the Spirit, argue, means a growing intelligence
about that.
A growing understanding of that.
It is not only now the basic consciousness,
but the growing understanding of what that means.
And as we grow in understanding of what
it means to have been chosen, to have
been called according to his purpose, life takes
on a great deal more fullness of meaning
and value and power.
It becomes something, something of tremendous power and
potency in our lives as we grow into
the understanding.
It's a mighty motive.
A mighty motive.
It's the thing that also girds us for
the race, the journey and the battle.
You see this is very closely in keeping
with this letter to the Hebrews.
Because it is this very sense of destiny
that is being spoken of in relation to
men right back from Abel onwards.
The whole caravan, as we have called it,
from Abel, Noah, Enoch, Noah and right on.
These men had in them this sense of
the hand of God having come upon them
with an object for a purpose.
And it was that sense of destiny which
enabled them on the one hand to leave
the world behind, its affairs and its interests
and its possessions, and on the other hand
to go patiently on, patiently on through the
years.
They were men who had seen something.
They had seen something.
Abraham saw my day, said the Lord Jesus.
Abraham saw my day.
He rejoiced to see it.
They'd seen something.
Abraham had seen something that this world could
never give the answer to.
A city and a heavenly country.
No matter how much they possessed of this
earth.
They'd never answered to it.
They'd seen something.
Still kept on going.
Moses saw something.
He, yes, he saw the God of Israel.
And he saw the pattern of the things
in the heavens.
But he saw more than that.
He saw more than that.
What a tremendous suggestion is found in this
accounting the reproach of Christ.
Greater riches.
That of Egypt.
The reproach of Christ.
He'd seen something that could never find its
answer in the types and the figures and
the symbols and the whole earthly representation.
He had seen something heavenly.
And so all these men had seen something.
And that seeing was bound up with this
sense of being called and of destiny.
And it kept these men going.
Moses, it says, he endured as seeing him
who is invisible.
He'd seen something.
And he endured.
He endured.
They endured.
And what was finished?
The power, the thing that girded them to
endure, to suffer and to die still in
faith, not having obtained.
It was this something in them.
It was a part of them.
Not something they'd taken on.
Something that was inborn.
Sense of purpose.
God appointed.
Destiny.
The letter to the Hebrews gathers that all
up and says, seeing we encompass the doubt
with so great a cloud of witness.
Let us run.
Let us run as they ran.
The race with patience.
Let us lay aside every weight.
And they so easily beset in sin.
That's doubt.
That's unbelief.
That's the concept shown.
Lay it aside.
Run with patience.
Girded by this same wonderful seeing.
Sensing.
Knowing.
We are called.
We are chosen.
We are related to some tremendous destiny.
But then this becomes specific.
It becomes specific.
It is not just general.
Zion is something that becomes very concrete in
Israel.
It is, so to speak, the gathering up
of all that the nation means.
And all that the land means.
And all that the city means.
And concentrating it, so to speak, at one
point.
It's something very concrete and concentrated.
So that this sense of destiny becomes not
something quite general and spread over and indefinite,
but something quite focused.
Focused.
And here I come to Zion.
This is not a repetition of something we
have said more than once in the conference.
This is something that is presented to faith.
And something that you and I have got
to recognize as being a matter which concerns
us.
So that while the apostle will present the
truth and tell us the facts about being
chosen in Christ, elect according to the foreknowledge
of God the Father, and so on.
While he would tell us all that, you
say, look here.
Walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are
called.
Make this something that comes into your everyday
life.
And it will redeem your everyday life from
the ordinary.
From the monotony.
From the trivial.
It will lift you right up onto another
level.
You know that you are, as a child
of God, related to some tremendous purpose.
And you've got to live on the basis
of a great purpose.
It becomes specific in that way.
Don't be alienated there.
You see, Zion, as we have said, is
a collective conception.
That is, it is that which joins the
Lord's people all together in one.
They found their conceptual point in Zion as
a nation.
It was Zion that was their cohesive strength.
The thing that brought them together.
Of course, naturally and literally that was true.
As they, at the given times, all went
up to Zion.
From all the tribes.
They came there and their national unity was
celebrated or enjoyed.
Though they had to live apart in many
places, and during the intervening months, they seemed
to be insular, really they were not.
And Zion was the testimony to, and the
experience of, their oneness as a people.
Now, that is a great factor about this
whole matter of Zion, where we are concerned
spiritually.
That it is a collective, shall I use
the more familiar word, a corporate thing.
And while perhaps in every, and truly in
every individual Jew was this sense of election
and destiny, every Jew held that relatedly.
No individual Jew thought that he was the
elect, and that the whole purpose of God
related to him alone.
He knew that what he had of that,
that calling, that election and that destiny was
a related matter.
And he found a strength of it in
the relatedness.
You see, it is the people, not the
individuals as such.
The individuals share it in their relationship with
the whole people.
God is after a people for a purpose,
and for his purpose.
And you and I will have our main
sense and strength of destiny and purpose in
a related way.
There is always a great deal of limitation
and danger about individuals thinking that they are
the elect, and that their job is the
job of all jobs.
God-given.
Anything like that is a breach of principle.
And it will certainly lead to a dead
end.
We have this relatedly.
That is, God's purpose is bound up with
a people.
His church.
And that which truly represents his church.
That is, which takes the true church character,
the heavenly body character.
Wherever that is found in representation, collectively, there
these things obtain.
And it's in that relatedness that we shall
come into our purpose in God.
And we shall come into this mighty sense
that God is after something.
He's after something.
And that we are related to that.
It's relatedness, you see, that is essential to
this motive, to this purpose, if we get
out of a right relatedness, a right spiritual
relatedness, a whole spiritual relatedness with that which
really is.
Chosen of God, formed of God, called of
God, in fellowship with his Son, concerning the
eternal purpose that is centred in his Son.
If we get out of a full and
right relationship with that, then life becomes limited.
We may get off the track altogether.
Weakness will set in.
And it will not be long, it will
not be long, before we begin to ask
the question whether after all we've been mistaken.
Whether all this wonderful truth about being called
and chosen really relates to us.
Now you see, that's exactly what happened when
Israel got away from Zion.
While they were in Zion, all right, no
questions, all is strength, all is life, all
is fullness, things are happening.
But then, through their spiritual decline, they were
moved away from Zion, they were out of
immediate touch with Zion, see, and became a
scattered people.
And big questions arose whether after all they
were the elect people.
Whether they really were God's people.
Whether this was not all some wonderful, beautiful
illusion.
They were called to a special purpose.
The whole thing came into question.
They lost their vision.
And where there is no vision, people go
to pieces.
And that is only another way of putting
this, where there is a loss of a
sense of destiny and calling.
Now Zion then means relatedness.
Get away from true spiritual relatedness.
And you expose yourself to terrible deprivations and
losses.
And perhaps sooner or later to take the
major question as to whether it is all
true or not.
When all this teaching really holds good and
works.
You'll find that it does hold good and
it does work if you're in right relationship.
In the right position.
It does.
And it works gloriously and it works terribly.
It works for you.
And it works against that which is against
it.
Now I know that so many people have
this difficulty.
You speak about being called and chosen for
a great purpose.
What's the purpose of my life?
Where do I fit into this?
What is my function?
And you're always making an individual and personal
matter of this in a wrong way.
Get focused again about this.
Get focused again.
If an Israelite should have asked that question,
What is my place?
What is my function?
What is my vocation?
For what I am called?
The answer would have been Zion.
Zion.
On every point the answer is Zion.
Do you see what I mean?
It doesn't relate to you out there as
so many individuals.
It relates to a collective thing that God
is doing.
And you will find your place and your
function in a related position.
You must not go and take the whole
purpose of God and pull it out to
you in some detached position.
You have got to come right into it.
Tremendous factor in vocation.
In fellowship.
In strength.
In purpose.
In fellowship.
And the enemy spoils the work and spoils
the purpose.
Brings in weakness and disintegration immediately.
He gets us out of fellowship.
And that's why he is so concerned to
do it.
But listen to your own heart.
Listen to your own new nature.
That's why he is so concerned to do
it.
But listen to your own heart.
Listen to your own new nature.
What was it that was in every Israelite
in those days when things were right?
They were distributed over the land from Dan
to Beersheba.
From the utmost frontiers together.
But this was true of them all.
There was an inward gravitation towards Zion.
They longed for Zion.
Their thoughts were turning to Zion.
If only, if only we could get to
Zion.
It's difficult to wait for the day to
go up to Zion.
Their inner being was all the time gravitating
in that direction.
Listen, dear friends, to your new nature and
disposition.
Is it not a very part of you
to long for the fellowship of God's people?
Is that not true of us?
We just must have it.
Our life seems to depend upon it.
The one, one great difficulty is when we
can't have it.
It's so much more difficult to live an
unrelated life.
Listen, in our very being there is this
gravitation towards fellowship and relatedness.
It's a part, you see, of the Spirit's
work in us.
And therefore it's a violation of our life,
a violation of the Spirit, the work of
the Spirit of God in us to be
out of fellowship.
To be unrelated.
To be independent.
To be what we call freelancers.
You know where that phrase comes from, I
suppose?
It comes from the world of journalism.
Freelance literally is one who runs about all
over the place, picking up little bits here
and there without any specific relationship.
He's not related to any one journal.
He rushes all over the place picking up
everything.
Like that.
His whole life is distributed and scattered.
There's nothing central, nothing cohesive about it.
He's just a freelance.
Well, he may make a living, but he
may maintain an existence, make something good out
of it in a way.
But you can't have that sort of thing
in Zion.
You can't have that sort of thing in
Zion.
Zion means that we are bound together with
the people of God wherever they are, whoever
they are.
Yes, the people of God because they are
the people of God.
Not because they belong to our society and
come along our line of things, but they're
the people of God.
We are one with them on the basis
of Christ.
Mark you, if that is true, if that
is true, God is able to do things.
God will stand by us.
Oh, with Israel this whole matter depended so
much upon the fullness of their spiritual life
and their allowing that life to govern, that
inner life to govern and respond.
If ever anybody should have resisted the gravitation
of their life, they would have found themselves
in a very difficult position.
Sometimes a tribe did that and disaster followed.
And in the case of the Lord's disciples
after his resurrection, there was one man, at
least, who tried it on and had a
very miserable time.
Poor Thomas.
He stayed outside.
When they were having a grand time inside,
he stayed out.
He kept himself apart.
And I can imagine that there was no
more miserable man on the earth than Thomas
during those days while he was staying out.
It was when he came in that he
found everything.
The answer to all his questions and the
new flow of life.
He found and worshipped my Lord and my
God.
So much for the value of Zion in
terms of relatedness and fellowship.
Remember, this will only be on a twofold
basis.
On the one side, the cross will have
to do a very thorough going work in
us in order to get us, in ourselves,
out of the way.
We are really the difficulty.
I must say with that.
But it is very necessary to get ourselves,
our interest, our ambitions, our pensions, our likes,
our preferences, all that is just ours personally,
to get it all out of the way,
thoroughly crucified and buried.
And on the other side, the positive side,
to be entirely under the Lordship of the
Holy Spirit.
The Lordship of the Holy Spirit, where the
Holy Spirit does dictate everything and we answer
to his dictation.
Now I want to pass to another point.
Zion was and is the motive of revival.
What is popularly termed revival is that which
is related to one thing as an objective
or an object.
It is related to souls being saved or
converted.
I think that sums up almost entirely the
general conception, the meaning of the word revival.
People are being saved on a large scale.
Well, we have nothing to say against that.
The Lord granted it.
But this whole matter of revival is so
largely unrelated to spiritual conditions in the church.
It is objective.
It is something which is bound up with
a certain kind of activity.
Objective activity with certain objective results.
Unrelated or out of relationship with internal spiritual
conditions.
And mark you, this matter of revival can
be, and I fear often is, a blind,
a blind to the real need.
A visitation of God in grace by which
many are saved is a sovereign act.
It is an act of sovereign grace.
But acts of divine sovereignty of sovereign grace
are one thing.
That is the thing with which there is
so much occupation and concern.
A sovereign act or visitation of God in
grace for the salvation of souls.
That is right, good, has been and God
grant that it may be again.
Man is concerned mainly with what he calls
revival in these terms.
Meaning outward happenings.
God and the Bible think of revival in
terms of the recovery of something.
It is revival.
It is a recovery of something that has
been lost.
Now the whole of the prophetic or prophet
section of the Bible was occupied with revival
in that sense.
The recovery of Zion.
Look through the prophets and see if that
is not the burden.
The burden of their message.
The burden of their cry.
The burden of their prayer.
It is all that Zion may be recovered,
restored, may come again.
The recovery of the glories of Zion.
Zion should come into the place that it
once held.
That runs right through the prophets.
So that the prophetic ministry has to do
not just with the sovereign acts of God's
grace externally and objectively but with the recovery
of something in the people of God themselves.
And that really is God's way of touching
the nations.
It was not until that was true of
Israel that the nations were touched.
God made that state of things internally basic
and contingent for the touching of the nations.
And the other will follow.
Yes, the other will follow.
As day follows night spontaneously when God has
in his people what he wants.
You will not need to have special efforts
to get souls saved.
They will be quietly being saved all the
time.
There will be something going out that is
touching, touching lives on an ever widening circle
when God gets what he wants amongst his
people.
It must be.
It is like that.
It is spontaneous.
It is inevitable.
So the prophets did not cry and pray
that the nations in the first place should
be saved.
They prayed that Israel should be saved and
then they saw that the nations would be
touched.
You see something of that probably this evening.
But there is a statement of fact that
revival from the Bible's standpoint is internal before
it is external.
It is recovery.
And for that a prophetic ministry, a ministry
concerning Zion is needed.
See what Zion really means.
Spiritually.
Stands for.
Heavenly aspect.
To have that burden.
That vision and that burden and a ministry.
That does not only mean a preaching ministry.
It means as much a praying ministry.
It means a burden on your heart.
That is a ministry sometimes.
It does not get on the platform.
It is a burden on your heart which
finds expression.
Oh, oh that the Lord's people.
I with them were as the Lord would
have them be.
The full meaning of Zion.
Recovery.
My last word follows on that.
Zion is a means to God's larger, greater
end.
Therefore that which it represents, that testimony, that
full testimony to the Lord Jesus in person
and word and placed in the divine appointment,
that as a revelation to the heart, the
hearts of God's people has to be planted.
Planted in the nation.
It has to be there.
The strategy of God is just this.
That He plants a testimony.
A testimony which is so according to His
mind, answering to His thought, that He finds
it perfectly safe to add to that.
That's God's way.
That's what we have in the New Testament.
Just what He did.
He planted a testimony in a nucleus here
and a group there.
And there they lived in the good of
Christ.
His work.
His praise.
And what happened?
God added.
Added daily to the church.
Those who were being saved.
God added.
But God must have something to which He
can add with a sense of confidence.
God is not going to add to our
institutions.
God is not just going to add to
and build up our particular private interest in
Christianity.
God is going to add to His Son.
And His Son as represented in His people.
He'll add according to the measure of His
Son.
Believe me, this is the key.
This is the key to the growth of
church.
It's a remarkable thing.
It's a remarkable thing true to history that
where there is something that answers to God's
thought in greater fullness and Christ is there.
Christ is the basis.
And Christ is there in expression.
God adds to that.
The solution to empty churches the problem of
empty churches and all that is along that
line.
It's going to be solved at all.
That's the only true way of solving it.
God adds.
When He's got that to which He can
confidently add.
So He must have Zion that He may
build up Zion.
He's not going to build up things.
He builds up Zion.
And Zion is the testimony living testimony to
and expression of His Son in fullness.
God plants in order to add.
He plants in order that He may have
a ground of argument with everything else.
Remarkable.
It opens another field which we had no
time to explore that Zion was God's instrument
of argument with everybody else.
He argued with the nations concerning Zion.
He argued with all the enemies about Zion.
He had there an instrument of argument.
If the questions were raised where is God
and what is God doing is the answer.
Is this whole thing true?
Here it is.
Here's the answer.
Does God indeed dwell with men these days?
Here's the answer.
No matter what question what attitude God argues
by having some concrete thing in hand.
Does it work?
Does this this call it teaching if you
like does it work?
Well, here's the answer.
God must have something with which to argue.
To argue back an answer.
It's pathetically tragic that God has so little
by which He can argue with other things
and other realms.
He hasn't got an answer concretely or adequately.
He hasn't got it.
But Zion was God's ground of argument.
As we saw this morning Nations came into
God's controversy over Zion.
Yes.
Controversy.
God had said to the prophet a controversy
with the nations and it was over Zion.
For your sake I have sent to Babylon
and will bring down all their nobles as
fugitives.
I will give Egypt for thee.
See, the ground of argument is Zion.
All that God could have was ground of
argument and answer.
Something which is in His hand.
The means of saying well, here it is,
you see.
Here it is.
Here is the thing.
And finally Zion is death which will be
the occasion of the overthrow of the whole
kingdom of Satan.
That is what is revealed in the Word.
Zion was the occasion of the overthrow of
Egypt, of Babylon, of Syria of Rome.
Rome lifted up its head against Zion.
I speak in spiritual language now, Zion.
And what happened to Rome?
Where is that mighty iron empire?
Broken.
Shattered.
Scattered.
In dust.
God argued on the ground of Zion, you
see.
With the nations, with the empires, He does.
And all that lies behind them is the
mighty kingdom of Satan.
And Zion will be the occasion of the
entire overthrow of Satan's kingdom and Satan's system.
How important then, how important it is that
God should have that which corresponds to Zion.
Does not this throw a lot of light
upon the enemy's ceaseless, ceaseless and unwavering activity
to destroy a full testament?
To prevent it or destroy it?
To mar a vessel that represents any greater
fullness of Christ?
To break it up?
To scatter it?
To bring reproach upon it?
To bring into it that which is a
cause of scandal or anything, everything?
To spoil that instrument of God?
To argue back to Satan?
God cannot answer Satan only by some means
here.
That's the, that's the whole story of the
book of Job, isn't it?
Satan challenges God on the throne of God
and God answers him in a man.
Exhausts him in a man.
There's a point in that story where Satan
disappears from the scene and is heard of
no more.
He's out of court.
God has answered him in that man.
God must have a ground of argument with
Satan.
I trust that you are not thinking in
objective terms of Zion, saying, well, I've been,
I've born there, my name is in the
road, the citizens of Zion, and all this
then refers to me and relates to me.
Take it, dear friends, lightly.