Wednesday, October 15, 2014

"That Which is Born of the Spirit" # 11

The Rule of the Heavens (continued)

Daniel 4:26; Romans 1:20; Hebrews 9:11, 23, 26

It was the rule of the Heavens which Nebuchadnezzar had to come to recognize, the thing to which the Lord brought him in a very severe and drastic way and He said, "Thy kingdom shall be sure unto thee, after that thou shalt have known that the heavens do rule." And it is into the content of the meaning of that great Divine statement that I feel the Lord would lead us at this time. I am more conscious than ever that in order that we may come to a spiritual understanding of this, we need the Holy Spirit to give us very special enablement. We are speaking of things that will not be understood or grasped only by the Holy Spirit's very definite enablement. We are going right back to those spiritual principles upon which God has hung everything with reference to Himself - the Heavens ruling.

And the significance of that statement is just this, that, while you may have presented in the Bible a system of things pertaining unto God, with may phases and aspects, many details, many forms of expression, those are not the things. They are only representations of heavenly, Divine, spiritual laws and principles. The earthly things are made after the pattern of things in the heavens, and the earthly and the natural world for the most part are not the realities. They are only reflections and representations of reality which is heavenly and spiritual. That is why we passed on to Hebrews where that is stated. There was tabernacle, but it was not the tabernacle. And all that was related to the tabernacle was but a representation, a system of sensory expressions given to a great, heavenly system, and it was the embodiment of spiritual laws and spiritual principles. And the type was destined  to pass to make room for the realities.

Here is this fact. There is a heavenly system which is entirely spiritual, which cannot for one moment be apprehended by the natural senses, but God has illustrated it by types and figures and various means, never intending that men should take hold of and perpetuate that which is only a type, but that they should come to recognize that, lying behind all that, there is a spiritual system which God wants them to enter into. We know this in a sense, but we do not recognize it adequately, and because we do not know this adequately Christendom is astray. It has laid hold on representations and made them realities, and so made the earthly thing an end, and failed to see the spiritual principles lying behind everything.

If you are only occupied with the thing, you will find sooner or later that that leads you nowhere. It cannot carry you through, and it simply becomes an end in itself. But immediately you get the spiritual principle back of that and are delivered from the mere thing in itself, then you get right through into what is altogether beyond limit. And God is governing by those spiritual laws. It is the heavenly system that is ordering everything. It is what lies behind in the unseen with God that is final, ultimate.

That being the case, we are able to understand why everything that relates to what is utterly of God demands spiritual revelation. It must and can only be revealed by the Holy Spirit, and that means that there must be a spiritual state on the part of the individual. They must be spiritual beings in the truest sense of their nature. That is the statement of Paul with which we are so familiar. He says that the natural man (the soulical man) receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, neither can he know them; they are foolishness unto him. "But he that is spiritual judgeth (discerneth) all things" (1 Corinthians 2:15).

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 12)



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