While it is never right to give pre-eminence to one part of the Word of God above any other part, and say it is more important, I think those of you who are familiar with this letter will agree that it has a peculiar significance and value for the present time; indeed, I know of no part of the Word of God which would be more revolutionary than this part if it were rightly apprehended and responded to. This fragment of it which we have quoted seems to come to us with special pointedness and poignancy. You notice that the context runs like this:

This universal shaking is said to be in order that there shall be nothing left but what God Himself has established. This letter is a comprehensive comparison and discrimination between the passing and the permanent, the shakeable and the unshakeable; and it is important to recognise that it was written to a people who for a long period had held the position of a people whom God had taken out of the world unto Himself, showing that even such a people may make their separation an earth-bound thing and have to be warned that that kind of separation is not God's kind of separation. God took them out of the world to be a people for Himself, and then in the course of time they gravitated earthward, so instead of being a heavenly people in the earth they became a religious people on the earth, and there is a great deal of difference. And such a letter as this had to be written to them to tell them, the people who were once taken out of the world for God by God, that they are to have their whole foundation shaken and their whole system of things, in the shaking, removed. On the other hand, the letter is a statement of permanent and final things, and the things which constitute the Kingdom which cannot be shaken.

Going for a few moments outside of this letter, may I remind you that the New Testament is comprised of twenty-seven books, most of which were written to combat some form of a universality of effort to destroy that which had come in with Christ. I want you to grasp that. The New Testament is a comprehensive countering of a many-sided attempt to subvert the church and to pervert the right ways of the Lord, and the chief point of the attack was and is the meaning of Christ's cross as to His own Lordship and as to the meaning of His Kingdom. In view of this mighty effort it was necessary, and is necessary, to make known the ground upon which security and triumph rest, and that is, of course, the positive side of the writings.

You take the four Gospels, and they were written to establish the fourfold claim of Christ to be, firstly, the rightful King; secondly, the Lord's Sent One; thirdly, the Son of Man, and, fourthly, the Son of God. Those four things were disputed. In each of those connections He was rejected; for all of those claims a cross awaited Him; and after He was risen and there was enough evidence in the world that the disputed challenge was hardly well-founded, these Gospels were written as a means to establish those claims. Now, of course, in the light of what we know of Him as the risen Lord, and all that has resulted from His resurrection and His exaltation, we are able to read the Gospels in a new light and we are able to see how confirming they are of His claims.

You pass to the book of the Acts, and there you have the Kingdom introduced from heaven and the risen Lord proceeding with His Kingdom activity, and the book for the most part is occupied with expansion, formation and opposition. And this opposition becomes manifold, many-sided. There is a universality of antagonism to what has come in through the cross of the Lord Jesus, and the rest of the writings of the New Testament deal with the many-sidedness of that antagonism, and each letter takes up some form of that opposition to what has come in with Christ through His cross.

We will now refer to some of Paul's writings alone. With the letter to the Romans we have a challenge to the cross undoubtedly, for the point of emphasis in that letter is the cross. Everything up to chapter 6 leads to it in every direct way, and everything from chapter 6 comes back to it. The cross is central. But the challenge is in relation to sin and righteousness, and the instrument of the challenge is the law, or external obligations. And what arises there is just the issue as to the value of the cross of the Lord Jesus. If the law prevails, then the cross goes out. If the cross prevails, the law goes out. If the law prevails, sin remains and righteousness is not found in God's universe. If the cross prevails, sin is dethroned and righteousness established. There is your challenge.

In the first letter to the Corinthians you have the challenge to the cross along another line. It is the challenge of the flesh in believers, the carnal nature in the people of God. The instrument of that challenge to the cross is just nature and the world working together; that is, believers proceeding in their Christian life upon a purely worldly and carnal basis. The cross is introduced there, or Christ crucified, and if the cross prevails the carnal nature goes out and the world is destroyed. If believers go on in carnality and in worldliness then the cross has been robbed of its power. That is the statement of the letter in a nutshell. It is a challenge to the cross from another angle.

You pass to Galatians, and again it is a challenge to the cross. See how many times the cross is referred to in that letter, and here you have not only the law but the whole system of Judaism rising up to destroy the value of Christ's cross. It is not only the question of sin and righteousness, righteousness which is of the law or of faith. That is not the specific argument in Galatians as in Romans. Here it is the whole system of Judaism, the whole range of that historic religion in its outward expression, and it rises up to bring believers again into bondage; and if Judaism prevails the cross, again, is destroyed as to its meaning and value; and if the cross triumphs Judaism goes out.

Then you pass from Galatians to Ephesians. It is again the challenge to the cross, and this time it is in relation to the character or nature of Christ's church. The Ephesians, and those included in that rather general term (for the letter was undoubtedly a circular letter for a region), had a background of pagan mysteries, rites, initiation, secret societies, a whole mystical system. The peril there was to make Christianity, and what had come in with Christ, just a mystical religion. You remember at Ephesus it was that they made the great bonfire and burned their books on magic and such like things. All those books contained the ritual and order and system of this mystical line of things, with initiatory rites into secret societies, and so on. Now you can see the place of this letter to the Ephesians.

I am always afraid of that phrase “the church mystical”, and yet it gives point to this letter when you remember the background of the people. Yes, the church is mystical, but not in the pagan sense. There is initiation, but not after their order. The church is heavenly, it is spiritual in reality, the church is not a seen, a tangible, an earthly thing. The knowledge of the things of God is not along the line of ordinary intellectual training and ability; it is only by initiation, “a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him …”. Do you see the peril?

Here you see there was a challenge to what had come in through Christ's cross, the true, eternal, spiritual, heavenly nature of the church which is His Body, and how that church is entered, what is the basis of membership of that Body, and what are the features of the life of that church as in a heavenly place with a heavenly revelation, something that has come out of eternity and goes through to eternity, in which time is only an incident. Oh, there is a large field for mysticism, but mysticism is not spirituality in the New Testament sense: it is an imitation, a false thing, it is Satan's counterfeit of the church, and multitudes of the Lord's people have fallen into the snare that was lying in the path of these converted pagans, and thinking of mystical Christianity and religion as essentially spiritual. We have to get a right understanding of the meaning of the word “spiritual” according to the New Testament, and not get into that morass of death which is merely mysticism.

You may think that is very much up in the air, far above us all, but, do not make a mistake, it is a snare for every one of us. There are those to be found very near at hand who are always probing into things to try and get something that is not obvious, something that is remote, and they think that if they can get behind the thing said and find some extraordinary interpretation that they have got the inner secret of the Word of God; and so we find a lot of these extraordinary, fantastic interpretations of God's Word by a probing into it and trying to draw out some fanciful interpretation. It is called spirituality, and larger and deeper knowledge, and it leads nowhere, only to death. There is all the difference between mystical interpretation and divine revelation.

Passing to the letter to the Colossians, you have another challenge to the cross, and this time it is in relation to Christ's supremacy. You know the whole line of that letter, the marvellous part of the first chapter in its presentation of Him. Here again the challenge came, this time through what was called Gnosticism, the people who claimed to know, to have extra knowledge. Such believed that that system of thought which saw the universe of the unseen as arranged and ordered in a great hierarchy of angelic beings, all in different ranks and orders, from the supreme archangel down in ever-widening circles and ranks of archangels and angels, coming down to the more inferior spirits. This was what lay behind the visible universe and governed it, and in the interpretation Jesus was just the supreme Archangel in the spiritual system. He was that and nothing more. They allowed Him the supreme place there, but that was as far as they could go.

Now you see the point of this letter. The apostle tears that theory to fragments, and says that in Him, through Him, unto Him were all things created, things in heaven, things in earth, things under the earth; angels and principalities were created by Him, and He is above all, all are in Him, all things held together in Him. He is appointed by God to have the pre-eminence. And that, all hung upon His cross. That is why in such a letter as the letter to the Colossians you have such emphatic passages as that in chapter 2 verse 12 about the circumcision of Christ, in which the whole body of the flesh is put away in baptism. If you do not have the application of the cross to your fleshly mind you become fantastic, and your fantasticism means that Christ is given a less place than God has given to Him. You may exalt Him, but to a lower place than His rightful place. There must be the circumcising of the mind and of the heart of man; he must know what it is to be buried with Christ in baptism. Do you see what hangs upon the cross? So much!

There is an assault upon the cross, because that is the supreme issue for the saints. How does the assault come? Along the pathway to the throne. It is that simple, commonplace language: “I beseech Euodia, and I beseech Syntyche, that they be of one mind in the Lord.” Do you see the relationship? If the enemy can get in between saints and get them at variance in mind and heart, get them divided, get the love of the Lord in them for one another damaged and interrupted, he has struck a blow at the prize, he has arrested their course on the way to the throne. Jesus, equal with God, emptied Himself, being found in fashion as a man, taking the form of a bondservant, humbling Himself, and becoming obedient unto death, yea, the death of the cross; wherefore God highly exalted Him. He has emptied Himself to come down, to be obedient unto death, in order that He should be there, not alone but having His church with Him, He loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might present the church to Himself not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, a glorious church.

Now here is the challenge. Called into union with Him in His exaltation. What will defeat it? How can it be arrested, prevented, hindered? Just in this way: Euodia and Syntyche - and all whom they represent - at variance with one another. You will never get to the throne that way. What is the remedy? It is the remedy of the cross. “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who…emptied himself…”. Why will Euodia and Syntyche be at variance? Because of some pride which keeps them back from saying, I am sorry! I was in the wrong! They are standing upon their dignity. “He emptied Himself, He took the form of a bondslave, He became obedient unto death, yea, the death of the cross” - shame, ignominy, humiliation, degradation. Sometimes in order to get to the throne it is necessary for us to degrade ourselves (if you will use that word, for pride often uses that word and says it will be a degradation). He did! There is the challenge to the cross along the line of Christians at variance, an attack upon the issue of the cross, the Throne.

Now, of course, we ought to go back and have a look at these components of the Kingdom which cannot be shaken. We are not going to do that at the moment. This is only an introductory word, but it is a call which has been reinforced during these days with tremendous pointedness. Are we quite sure that we are receiving now the Kingdom which cannot be shaken? Note the language, note the tense. “Wherefore receiving (present active) a kingdom which cannot be shaken”. It does not say the Kingdom is going to come; the Kingdom has been introduced, and the Kingdom is going to be consummated: it is progressive and it is spiritual. The question, put quite bluntly, is this: Are we quite sure that we are founded and grounded in the spiritual and the heavenly realities of Christ and His cross, or are we simply linked up with some system of truth, doctrine, practice? Are we dependent upon the externalities of our faith, or have we the risen, living Lord resident in our hearts, and is He answering to all the need of our spiritual life, as represented by that system which has been put aside? Has the question of sin been for ever settled for us by His one offering? Is the question of sanctification settled for us? Is the question of glory settled for us? Is the question of going through triumphantly settled for us?

We come back to this letter to the Hebrews, and we can narrow the whole thing down to it. In the first place, is there not some peculiar and wonderful significance about the preservation of this letter in particular? You see, it was written for a special occasion, and that occasion was one historically very near to the time of its writing. If, as many believe, its date was between 66 and 70, then it was very near in time to the actual carrying out or fulfilment of the thing for which it was written; that is, it was written because Jerusalem and Judaism in the order in which it then existed was about to be shattered to pieces and scattered to the ends of the earth, it was preparation for that, and that took place in 70. So the letter, written so near to the occasion, fulfilled its purpose within a very short time.

Why, then, should it last out till now? Why should it occupy the place that it occupies now in the preserved and protected writings of the New Testament? Some have been lost, we know. Why did not the Lord let this be lost, seeing that it had fulfilled its purpose? I venture to say that this letter is living now. It is not a letter that has no life in it, as though it had served its purpose and could now be put aside. It is a tremendous letter as a spiritual document today. What does it mean? Why was it written? Certain Jews had turned to Christ, and in turning to Christ had turned to the fulfilment of all their Jewish patterns, all their Jewish types and figures and shadows, passed from the substance to the reality. Then ardent Jews came along and sought to make it very hard for them. It meant ostracism, boycott, persecution, and much suffering; and a great effort was launched to Judaise Christianity, that is, to link Christianity on with Judaism and preserve, maintain, perpetuate all the Jewish orders in connection with Christianity.

That was the content of the letter in brief. Its object was immediate. How far it achieved its object we do not know. It is possible that some of those believers went back in spite of the repeated warnings, and perished with Jerusalem and Judaism. It is probable that many of them were saved by this letter, so that when Jerusalem, the temple and the Jewish system was shaken, as the Word says, and ceased to remain, their link was with heaven, with a living, risen, exalted Christ, and it meant nothing to them of loss that all that did go. The immediate purpose was accomplished. Why maintain the letter? Why keep it alive? Why preserve it? That is the question we have to answer, and the answer is that the letter does not merely deal with an historic instance. It deals with an abiding tendency. It is something which is always the peril of God's people, whether they be Jews or Christians. The value of this letter today is that it is a letter no longer to Jewry, no longer to Israel but to the Christian church, and that is why it lives, because God knows that that tendency is a persistent one in the direction to which these Hebrew believers were being tempted, and in the direction to which they were almost being driven. So that something very concrete arises. It is this: that Christianity can become exactly what Judaism became, and God is against that. And it brings us back to the central point of our earlier meditation. It is one of the master-strokes of Satan against the Lord Jesus, and the principle result of his work is tradition. By that I mean the making of things into a system run by man. Now that covers a lot of ground, a lot of history. Christianity has become a repetition of Judaism. Organised Christianity today is what Judaism was when this letter was written: an historic thing, a systematised thing, a whole system of beliefs, truths, doctrines, activities, movements, which are very largely but an imitation of something.

We come to the New Testament. As to the things taught in the New Testament, we say these are the New Testament doctrines and we are called upon to subscribe to these doctrines. Now we are not going to attempt to cover the ground of what the New Testament doctrine was. Fundamentalism as such draws a circle around New Testament doctrines, but then there are a good many that go beyond that. Then we come to the New Testament and we see not only doctrines but practices, and we say, This is the practice of the New Testament. Then we come again, and we see the activities, what we may call the work which was carried on or carried out in New Testament times by the apostles, by the church. And then we come again and we see what the church was in New Testament times. We have a presentation of the church as it is here on the earth.

Now those four things since New Testament times have been taken up as a system and imitated: that is, there has been the forming of the doctrine into the creed, the Christian creed, and it is accepted, and we say, I believe in so-and-so! Why do you believe in it? Because it is in the New Testament. Well, that may be quite good so far, but you proceed beyond that. This was the practice of the church in New Testament times: therefore we can do likewise. This is how the church was organised (I am doubtful about that word, but we will use it for the moment) in New Testament times. This is how the church came into being, and how it was ordered and arranged in New Testament times, therefore we do the same. We have our churches on that basis, we imitate. And then as to the work, whatever it might be, evangelism and all the other activities on the side of the work of Christianity as a movement, we see this is what happened, we do the same, we imitate. And so for centuries the thing has become a system like that, of imitation, and that is what I mean by tradition.

That can just be Judaism repeated in Christendom. That is what Judaism was. Remember that Judaism came from God out of heaven at one time; it came by revelation, and it came in power, and it was accompanied, as this letter points out, with the voice of a trump, with fire and smoke, shaking and earthquake. It came with the accompaniments of God Himself, all terrible, a consuming fire: and yet it became that, a thing which had to be overthrown, for the overthrow of which God had to shake the earth. It became the thing which was the occasion of the chief conflicts of apostolic times. Paul's battles were on the field of Judaism. Yes, a thing which originally came from God, now one of God's main difficulties, doing more harm than it is worth, set aside, repudiated. You have only got to look at Jewry today and see how much respect God has for Judaism as such. Well, Christianity came from God, out of heaven, and this letter says that Judaism came through man but this faith came from the Son of God Himself. That is the comparison. He that spoke then on the earth, Moses; how much more in the case of Him that speaks from heaven. “God, who in time past spake unto the fathers in the prophets … hath at the end of the times spoken unto us in his Son …”; yet the peril and possibility and tendency is exactly the same in both cases, the end can be similar, and God will yet shake Christendom to its foundations, that it shall be shattered as He has done with Judaism. That is the testimony here. Yes, all our creeds, all our imitation of the New Testament. God never meant anything of His in this dispensation to be an imitation. He meant it to be the real thing. The difference between the real thing and the traditional is between life and death. Tradition is in one realm and life is in another. It depends entirely upon whether it is earthly or heavenly.

I am impressed with that phrase, “… as of things which are made …”; that is, things shaken, passing. “Things which are made”; imitations are always made. The original is never made: that comes out from God Himself. What then is the truth? What is it that God is after? Well, you turn to the beginning of this letter and it all becomes very clear at the outset. “God, having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us Son-wise.” It is not just what Jesus said: it is what Jesus is. The revelation is not of something, it is a Son-revelation, and if you pursue this thought - and you will have to seek to follow closely - into this letter a little further, you will find that this word “Son” is a term, not only a personal designation. It belongs to Him in a unique way, in a specific and peculiar way, in a way which has that in it which is not shared by any other, and yet there is that in it which is an imparted thing, and God speaks first of all Son-wise in the absoluteness and finality of His Son.

Then it is not long before you find yourself being engaged with a secondary thought; that Son's relatedness to the race, and bringing out of the race sons, and bringing them to glory, so that a family issues, “Wherefore, holy brethren, partners in a heavenly calling …”; “… bringing many sons to glory …”; “… he is not ashamed to call them brethren …”. And then you move on from what lies between, and you come to chapter 12: “My son, despise not the chastening of the Lord … whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.” We gave to the fathers of our flesh reverence: how much more unto the Father of our spirits. There you have got to the heart of things. What is the essence of living Christianity? What is the thing that God is after, which will be established, which will be eternal, which will satisfy His heart, which will fulfil all His intention, and which will be the very occasion of His shaking the heavens and the earth to get rid of all else? It is Sonship.

It is in Sonship that we have all that God means, and so here you see it is a matter of living union with the living Son of God as raised from the dead and exalted to God's right hand: for that is what this chapter says. “Unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee?” Turn to the book of the Acts, chapter 13 and verse 33: “He raised up Jesus, as it is written, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.” Now He was the Son of God from eternity, He was the Son of God when He was born at Bethlehem, He was the Son of God in Jordan's waters, attested there, but here is something peculiar, related to Him in Sonship: He is declared, says Paul, the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead. God raised Him, as it is written, “Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.”

There is a Sonship connected with His resurrection which is of peculiar significance, because when Jesus was dead (if I may put it this way) that was an end of everything, everything as to the thoughts and intentions and purposes of God. If Jesus had remained dead, all God's eternal purposes would have ceased. When God raised Him from the dead and He lives again, it is Sonship, but it is Sonship in an inclusive way. All God's purposes and thoughts and intentions spring to life again, have realisation, and this very principle of Sonship is a related thing, is a family thing, is that He should not be the only begotten but the first begotten; that He should be the firstborn from among the dead, that He should be the firstfruits of those that sleep, “Bringing many sons to glory”. And so Sonship has a very far-reaching significance in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.

Now then, Sonship embodies, as you may see, all the thoughts of God, all the purposes of God, all that God has before ordained and intended. It is in the Son whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom He made the ages. Now the Spirit of God's Son, of that risen, living Son, is given to believers for the purpose of realising all those intentions and thoughts of God in the church, and that is God's method. God's method is not to call upon you and me to accept certain doctrines, prescribe to certain things set forth as New Testament truths, to act in a certain New Testament way, and do a certain kind of New Testament work. God's all-inclusive thing is that you and I should receive the Spirit of His Son, and from that time everything is in His hands. We do not take on anything from the outside; everything begins from inside. And anybody who simply takes Christian truth as in the New Testament from the outside, accepts it, adopts it, and assents to it, will become a traditional Christian and a dead one, and anybody who tries to conform to the New Testament order of things has put on a mould, a garment and will simply get into what the New Testament describes as “dead works”. Anybody who tries to do the work of the Lord, because that was done, and it was done in that way, in the New Testament, will find that they have a long way to go in the matter of power with which to meet the demands. Unless the Son of God does it all, and that from within, in the end it will be lost, it will be shaken, and it will fail to possess. Everything becomes inward by Sonship. Christ is the sum total of God's thoughts, God's desires, God's intentions.

Now that is difficult to grasp. How can I put it clearly to you? The apostle Paul, after he had met Jesus of Nazareth on the Damascus way, went away into Arabia for two or three years. He got new things revealed in him by the revelation of God's Son in him. God's thoughts in Christ, God's intentions in Christ were revealed to him. Up to that time Paul had been pursuing a course dictated by outward acceptances. If Jewry said a certain thing ought to be done, because Jewry said it Saul did it. He conformed to the outward system. It was something imposed. But now the whole initiative had been taken out of his hands, the authority had been taken away from him, and from a system. Now his relationship with the living, exalted Jesus of Nazareth meant that he could no longer adopt his own course, follow his own thoughts, be governed by any outward order or system. Even though that thing had originally come in through and from God no longer could it be the governing thing in his life, the thing now is, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” Then there was a new Lordship, a new mastery, and on his side a new imprisonment, and he was going to be tested all through his life as to that basis. He had the Old Testament, but I challenge you to find in the Old Testament what Paul found in it, without special revelation of the Holy Ghost. I could give you one or two passages quoted by Paul, and ask you if you could see that in the Old Testament. There is every justification on the natural line and ground for what his opponents said, that he was just reading into the Old Testament his own ideas. But we do not believe that. With spiritual illumination you see that that is what God meant, but it is extraordinary that God meant that: it never looked like that at all. Judaism said that God said it meant this. Now then Paul, you are going to be tested by God's thoughts as interpreted in your heart by the Spirit of God's Son.

That brings us right back to this first chapter of the letter to the Hebrews, Jesus Christ, God's Son, is absolute Lord, and that Lordship has got to have its expression in the believer in the power of the Holy Spirit, so that the believer is not governed by anything but the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the living, exalted Christ, and that is the only safe way; it is the only true way. It is made so perfectly clear, with an abundance of evidence in the Word. You go through this letter and see what it says about the new covenant, for instance. And then you take up other parts of the New Testament which deal with the new covenant, like the second letter to the Corinthians, and see what the new covenant is. Well, it is quoted from Jeremiah 31:31: “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah.” What is the nature of the new covenant? “I will write my laws in their hearts, and upon their minds will I write them.” Paul says in 2 Corinthians, “Not on tables of stone with pen and ink, but upon the tables of the heart by the Spirit of the living God”. This new order of things is the inward writing of God's Spirit in the heart of His people as to what He wants. John writing his epistle says, “The anointing which you have received abideth in you, and ye have no need that anyone teach you, for the anointing which abideth in you teacheth you …”. You say, that is dangerous; that makes everybody a law to themselves; that is setting the Word of God on one side. Do not think that. There is one Spirit, not so many Holy Spirits as people who receive Him. The Holy Spirit will never take us away from the Word of God, but He will fulfil it in us, and we will come to know the Word of God as we can never know it by the most ardent application and study; and believe me, no Holy Spirit governed life will at any point contradict the Word of God. It is because of this other kind of thing that reading any part of the Word of God results in a hundred or five hundred or a thousand different interpretations of it, and applications of it, and practices concerning it. There is all the difference between the thing made and the thing not made. The thing made is mechanical, the thing not made is organic; it is living.

So that God's thoughts and intentions become the testing ground of a believer. Oh well, God has a plan, and He does not reveal His plan to us all at once: but as far as He goes as a rule - even with His most devoted, consecrated, sacrificing servant - is the next step. And so Paul, with all his revelation, and all his vision, and all his walk with God, and all his knowledge of the Lord, would just be allowed to go to the border of a country with his own feeling that that is the direction, that is from where the call comes, that is where the need lies, and that is the thing to do. Yes, he is a devoted man, he is a consecrated man, but he has thought that this is the present movement, this is the present direction, this is where the present need is, this is where the call is, and just there he gets a showing from the Lord that night that it is in another direction altogether, and when he explains it he says: “Assuredly gathering …”. (That is, “concluding.”) And so he leaves that about which he had such strong convictions and for which he had such good arguments, and goes this other way. He has been tested as to whether he will follow outward dictates, the dictates of appearances and seeming demands, or whether the voice of the Spirit in him will govern him.

Now we can organise our movements, lay our plans, draft our schemes. We can lay it all out according to the New Testament and it can be dead, ineffective. God is merciful, God is gracious, and God is sovereign, and in so far as there is devotion to Him, and in so far as His interests are at our hearts, and in so far as there is a possibility of something being accomplished for Him, He blesses; but that is not the point at all. The thing is, Can God go all the way with this? Is this ultimately God's way, God's thought? Will not a very great deal of that go when the shaking comes? That is the point. The thing is now what God Himself through the Spirit of His Son is doing in a living way. Every life, and every assembly has to be constituted directly and immediately upon the basis of the living expression of the thought of God, and that thought as wrought into the very life by testing. A thought from God, a divine thought is not enough. It is not enough to carry us through. It is not enough to act upon. That thought has got to test us, try us, until we are constituted by that thought. You are dealing with tremendous principles. It is not enough for me to say to you that the Word of God means this, and for you to take it and straight away in accepting it, try to make it a part of your order of things. It may be the truth, you may have to believe it, you may have to adjust yourself to it, you may have to obey it, but it has not become a living power in you until you have been tested on it, tried on it, taken through the fires by it, and that thought of God has become a part of your very being, that you are constituted according to it in perfect oneness with the living Lord. It is thus that the believer's life becomes a living expression of those thoughts and desires and intents of God. It is thus that the church is constituted. You cannot imitate apostolic methods. The Holy Ghost must do this. He must constitute the church.

You see the difference between a traditional system, whether it be Judaism or Christianity, and a living thing coming all the time in a living way out from the Christ Himself by the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit Himself doing it. Well, this is going to cost something. See what it meant for these people. At the end of this letter you come on this: “Wherefore, Christ also … suffered without the camp. Let us therefore go to him without the camp, bearing his reproach.” The camp was Judaism, and He suffered without the camp because He repudiated Judaism and stood for the realisation of all God's thoughts as in Himself personally. He gathered up everything into His own person, “I am.” It is the Christ who is the full sum and embodiment of all God's thoughts and ways, and that takes the place of Judaism, and He, therefore, repudiated Judaism and suffered without the camp. Let us go to Him without the camp.

If, as we were saying at the beginning, this letter's preservation has any significance at all from God's standpoint, then its significance is that it applies to the same tendency in Christianity as there was in Judaism. What is the issue? If you are going to take this line you are going to repudiate organised Christianity, going to repudiate Christendom as a traditional system, going to repudiate that order of things which is made, and going, therefore, to suffer reproach and be outside of the camp suffering His reproach. In other words, in line with what we have said earlier, we are immediately going to come up against that force of antagonism to stop what has come in through the death and resurrection and exaltation of the Lord Jesus, the heavenly thing. Is it not sad that these people met it through God's historic people, the people who claimed to have the oracles, to be the elect, to be the favoured of the Lord? It is always like that. “A man's foes shall be those of his own household.” Do not narrow that down to the limits of a family where one is a Christian and all the rest are not. That is not the point at all. It is his own household, the Christian household. You will meet the antagonism to what has come in from heaven as a heavenly thing; you will meet the antagonism amongst those who are the traditional people of God in this dispensation. That is how it will be. That is going to be the cost of a walk in life with the Lord and not with man, knowing the Lord for yourself.

Now what will be the form? Why all this difference, this separation? Well you see, it is so difficult to understand, and yet the fact stares you in the face that organised Christianity as it is today cannot understand anything that is not organised, that is not advertised, that is not run. It must have names that carry weight, that mean influence. If you can get people with some title you are going to have the guarantee of success for your Christian enterprise. And so the letters and the titles strung on are a necessary requisite for the success of the Lord's work. You must write it up in the press, you must give a report of it, you must be able to make some kind of return that people can read, and say, This is a successful thing. If you cannot do that the whole thing is doomed to failure. They say, you must advertise, you must have publicity, you must organise, you must bring in all these things to support it, to carry it on. If you did none of those; if you were never heard of in the press; if you never had a report; if you never had any names; if there was nothing at all that came out in a public way for people to take account of, what is the verdict of organised Christianity? Nothing is being done. You are doing nothing. It is a-hole-in-a-corner sort of thing. Is that true? What must we say about that? There was a striking absence of all that in the beginning, and a marvellous manifestation of power, of progress, of effectiveness, so that nothing could stand in the way. We must only conclude, we are driven to this extremity, that the Lord can do His own work. Evidently the risen Lord is able to carry on His own work, the Holy Ghost knows how to manage things. What a surprising discovery! Forgive my irony. I say, this is that upon which Hebrews 12:26-28 is fixed. “I will shake the earth and the heavens”; that which can be shaken will be shaken; that which cannot be shaken will remain; and what is that? It is what God has done. “Whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever.” What God does is done in a spiritual way, is spiritual, is heavenly, is eternal.

That may leave you perhaps in a vague, perplexed position, not knowing where you are, but I have no doubt about the truth of the message. If you do not feel you can accept it; if you disagree; if you revolt; if you feel it cuts clean across all your training, all your acceptance; if you feel that it runs counter to all that you know, all I ask of you is honesty with God. I ask you to come and ask Him to open to you the meaning of the letter to the Hebrews, why it was written, what its significance is, why God has preserved it, what its application is now. Have honest dealings with the Lord. Please do not go away hot in spirit, antagonistic; do not lay this at the door of any man. At least give God a chance. It may be costly, it may be that you will have to be prepared to accept the position that God's greatest work through you is something hidden, something secret, something that no one can read about, perhaps no one can discern what is going on; and it is the mightiest work that God is doing. But, oh, this natural life - how it must see, how it must be in things. That is just the point. Where the cross has done its work to slay that natural craving of ours to have some feeling, some place of some kind in the things of God, not prepared for God to do His work through us without our coming in some way personally into it.

We must remember that the Kingdom is always referred to as something being already in existence and that as complete. It is not something now being formed, constituted, or built. It is something which, already being in existence, is to come to be received, to be entered into: “Thy kingdom come.” Receiving a Kingdom: “Except ye receive the kingdom as a little child, ye cannot enter therein.” Here the word, as we have already pointed out, indicates that, so far as we are concerned, the Lord's people, it is a matter of progressively receiving the Kingdom, receiving that Kingdom more and more. The Kingdom is complete, it is full, it is a realised thing, but for us it is a matter of receiving that Kingdom in ever-growing fulness.

The governing factor about the Kingdom is the element of finality, the accomplished fact, the established thing, the unshakeable truth and reality; therefore the sons of the Kingdom should be characterized by this particular and dominant feature, assurance. If we have rightly understood and apprehended the Kingdom, we ought to be the most assured people in God's universe, for a real spiritual understanding and apprehension of the Kingdom will destroy all uncertainties, will put aside all doubts and questions, will deliver us from all that weakness and paralysis resultant from a question, an uncertainty. It will make us at the centre of our beings an established thing: we shall be taking our spiritual character from the very Kingdom to which we belong, and that is what it means to be in the Kingdom, and to be sons of the Kingdom. We take our character therefrom, and it is this element of finality which is predominant in the matter of the Kingdom.

You know how the whole letter bears upon that, but even that has to be looked at from more than one angle. Turning to chapter 1 we have right at the outset a declaration concerning the finality of the person in God's appointment. The Son is God's final appointment: “Whom he appointed heir of all things”. He appointed the Son heir of all things. All things are His inheritance. You cannot get outside of all things, and there is nothing after that. Finally Christ inherits all things by the eternal appointment of the Father, of God. Upon that all our faith hangs. The whole question of faith is immediately raised by that first finality. Do we believe that the end which is fixed, and the thing about which there is no question at all is that Jesus is going to inherit all things? Do we believe that, in spite of all the course which this world's history has taken, and is taking, and all that seems to be so much to the contrary; in spite of all the grasping for world possession and world dominion; in spite of all the disputing and the quarrelling over the inheritance in this earth; in spite of all the apparent grip that Satan has upon things; in spite of the deeply rooted and apparently established order of things, which it sometimes seems so nearly impossible to change, to root up, to destroy? That is the first question for faith. It has been the challenge to faith all the way through.

Of course, we are so largely spectators. We have been very nearly more than spectators, and we find ourselves in the position in which a large number of the Lord's people are today, in the havoc, the chaos, the evil consequences of evil, the very Devil's work; in a position of utter impotence, helplessness, driven, no home, no place of rest, nothing here but all around the terrific pressure of evil, the domination of iniquity. This is where the challenge to faith comes. It is in conditions like that that the big question arises. But this letter, and, of course, much more in the Word of God, brings at the outset this before the people of God for their faith, that in the appointment of God, His Son is the heir of all things, and He will have His inheritance no matter what intervenes. This very first presentation to faith links with the whole of chapter 11, for that chapter, that great survey of faith through the ages, is linked with the ultimate issue for the people of God, and that issue is the complete, universal sovereignty of the Lord Jesus Christ, God's Son. That is the inheritance.

Now that is the first factor of the Kingdom which cannot be shaken. To these Jewish believers, who were passing through such deep trial, persecution, suffering for the faith, for the testimony, receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken meant that they were to rest upon and be established in the fact as a living thing in their own hearts, that finality is bound up with Jesus as heir of all things, and it is presented to us in the same way. Let us remember that all the conflict of history circles and rages around that one thing, and as history grows and the times near completion, the end draws nigh, the one thing which will rise clear in definition out of all other things will be this finality of issue: Who is Lord in God's universe? Who is God's appointed and eternal King? Who is the inheritor of the earth? And that issue is being steadily urged today. This question of world lordship is centred not now in a great number of lords but in one. It is being narrowed down, it has come to a very few, and the question is a very, very hot one; the pursuit of this thing is very feverish. Let us not be deceived. Oh, we thank God for respite, we thank God for a little postponement, but do not let us be deceived. We are probably today at a point of far greater seriousness than we were some time ago, for we are obviously very much nearer that point when: “They shall say, Peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh ….” God has sought to stir us to the depths by allowing things to go that far in order to bring us up and make us realise that at any moment our testimony may be suspended. Therefore let us give the greater diligence for the time is short. Any day we might have to say, It is the end, no more can be done. Then for utterness for God until that time comes!

There will not be a giving up of this grasping, or an abandoning of the programme. There is something more deeply at work than is seen. There is the drive of that one who must produce his Antichrist. It is in God's Word. It will come to pass. There will be one who sits in the temple of God announcing that he is God, and being worshipped as God, claiming the allegiance and worship of the world. The whole thing will be headed up into that one, and then the question will be between two only, between that one and the One who has sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high. There is no question about the issue when that clash comes: “Whom the Lord shall destroy by the brightness of his coming”. God is going to see that it is all headed up to one, and then He whose right it is to reign will come and will smite with the brightness of His appearing the all-inclusive one of the Devil's producing. Receiving that, now receiving that! That is the basis of the Kingdom which cannot be shaken.

Then the second thing as to the person is Christ, the Son, as God's final speech: “… hath at the end of these times spoken unto us in his Son …”. He who in old time spoke by divers portions and in divers manners hath gathered it all up at the end of these days, and has spoken in fulness and in finality in His Son. So that the Kingdom which cannot be shaken is a matter of the utter government of the Lord Jesus Christ in what He represents as the embodiment of God's thoughts and expressions. I can put that much more simply. The Kingdom which cannot be shaken, which we are to receive, is a matter of the complete knowledge of the Lord Jesus. You and I have not got to learn all kinds of truths and doctrines, teachings and interpretations. It is not our business, our obligation to be familiar with all the different kinds of doctrinal truths in the Word of God. Of course, it is very useful in a subsidiary way to know these things, but if we know them all they simply become a matter of intellectual knowledge, and they can then become the ground of a good deal of discussion, argument, and dispute; but they do not get you further than that in a spiritual way. They never constitute for us a Kingdom which cannot be shaken: they constitute the kingdom which is never stable; this doctrinal kingdom, this point-of-view kingdom, even in the things of the Bible. The Kingdom which cannot be shaken is knowing Jesus Christ in our own hearts, God speaking in us in His Son.

I must remind you again that that is exactly what the apostle Paul says in his second letter to the Corinthians. When God gave expression to His thoughts in the old dispensation He did so by writing on tables of stone: that is, it was an outward, objective presentation of obligations brought to rest upon His people. That is the old dispensation: that is past. Now, says the apostle, in this dispensation it is not so, but there is a covenant, there is an expression, there is a revelation of God's thoughts, God's mind, God's will for His people; but now it is upon the fleshly tables of the heart, written by the Spirit of the living God. And right in connection with that the apostle says: “God hath shined into our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” God has spoken in His Son, and now it is a matter of our knowing Christ in an inward way by revelation of the Holy Spirit. That is the Kingdom which cannot be shaken.

I have marvelled at Paul many times, and I expect you have. I have said many times that I do not know how Paul managed to go on. How did he go through? How did you go through, Paul? You tell us all these things that befell, you give us these lists of happenings, and then I see that, after your long life spent to the last drop for your Lord, and being used so mightily, with such a wide range, I see you at the end shut up, held in a chain, in prison, and I know that you are getting news from the whole field of your life's activities that your work is simply being destroyed; it is falling to pieces, and all those for whom you were used to bring to the Lord are forsaking you. I hear you say: “All they in Asia be turned from me.” Paul, how do you get through? How can you be so triumphant? How can you write so much about the heavenlies, and every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus, with those conditions around you? And my answer is found in his first letter to the Galatians: “It pleased God … to reveal his Son in me.” If Paul had adopted a system called Christianity and given a kind of mental assent to all the propositions doctrinally of Christianity, he would not have lasted a year. His first year would have put him out, and yet he went right through because of this: “It pleased God … to reveal his Son in me.” That is the Kingdom which cannot be shaken. All other knowledge of the Lord will find us wanting in the day of the ordeal, when heaven and earth are shaken. We shall go to pieces; we shall collapse under the strain. Do take this to heart.

The question is: Have we got the unshakeable Kingdom within? That is, in a word, do we know the living Son of God in a living way within us? “God hath spoken”! Are we progressing in the knowledge of God in Christ? For He, the Son, encompasses all God's fulness. All that ever we are to know, to have of God, is in Christ. God has given Him, and with Him given all things. We have to learn Christ, and learn Him in an inward way, and as we learn Him inwardly, what He is, how He expresses God's own thought, desire, will, purpose, nature, the Kingdom which cannot be shaken is taking root in us, so we are receiving that Kingdom. To receive the Kingdom is to be progressing in the inward knowledge of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, in all the comprehensiveness of God's fulness dwelling in Him.

The apostle draws the distinction between God speaking on the earth through Moses, and Israel being responsible for God speaking through Moses on the earth. Now He says, How much more when it shall be a speaking from heaven, and that through the Son. What a great responsibility it is when God speaks from heaven through the Son. “God … hath … spoken in his Son.” Our responsibility lies there. God has spoken, and God has spoken in Christ. Now all responsibility is summed up and bound up with that in this sense: we are not going to have to answer for any other thing before God than for our response to His voice in Jesus Christ. I think many people have an idea that when they stand before God and are in judgement the whole question of the ground of their judgement will be spread over quite a lot of ground. How many sins did you commit? How much better or worse you were than someone else! They seem to think that they are going to stand a much better chance in the judgement if they have not committed quite as many sins as someone else, if they have not done certain things that other people have done. If they have been an improvement on certain fairly poor types of people their judgement will be according to the degree of their goodness or their badness: and if, therefore, they can so curtail their bad deeds as to bring them to a minimum they are going to stand quite a fair chance in the judgement.

You may smile at that, but that is the inveterate habit of this nature of ours, and that is why so many wear worried looks. As Christians they are always poking around inside to find something good, and because they find so much bad they are miserable; and they have never come finally to God's conclusion about the whole matter of what they are, that in them dwells no good thing, and they are always trying to find some good thing, and, not finding it, they are miserable. We are already in spirit standing before a judgement seat of God, bringing ourselves under judgement, under condemnation, and it is a false judgement seat. It is something of our own imagination or of Satan's projecting. Let me say now, quite definitely and precisely: the ground of all judgement is our reaction to God's presentation of His Son, not how many sins, be they few or many, or how much badness, little or much. It is this: God has spoken in His Son, and what have you done? That is where responsibility begins and ends. Judgement is simply a matter of our response to God in Christ. It simplifies the whole matter, gets rid of a great many difficulties.

What is your heart attitude to the Lord Jesus? If you can answer that, then you have got the answer to your standing before God. It is there that responsibility begins and ends; it is final. You and I can say, Oh yes, in me, that is, in my flesh dwells no good thing, I am the chief of sinners; nevertheless, my heart is all towards God's Christ, and by God's grace I am going on to respond to everything that God will make known to me of His will in Christ. That is the only ground of responsibility which lies at our door, and there it ends. That is all God's requirement. It is very simple, very blessed. Let it be remembered that it is just where we refuse to respond to the voice of God in Jesus Christ that we have to take the responsibility, but inasmuch as we give a full and hearty response to the Lord Jesus, God takes all the rest of the responsibility, and, of course, that is the gateway into the very next part of this consideration: finality in the work of the Person.

Now the priestly person of the Lord Jesus is there and elsewhere seen to have as His supreme, central, all-inclusive factor, eternity. The whole point of the argument is that the Lord Jesus, as God's High Priest, stands altogether outside of any particular period of time, dispensation or economy. His origin no one knows, without beginning of days, without genealogy. He is the Eternal One, and He is that not only as a member of the Godhead, not only as Very God in deity, and not only as the eternal Son of God, but here the point is that He is eternal in His priestly person: He bounds all time and all eternity in His person as priest. The principle of that eternity is an indissoluble life, and a life which is not subject at all to the effect of time, a life which in no way is tainted or touched by that which means corruption and death; so that being constituted on the principle of this indissoluble, incorruptible, indestructible life, there is that in the very priest Himself which is unshakeable. This Kingdom which we are receiving, or which we are exhorted to be receiving, is a Kingdom which is built upon this priestly person who Himself is constituted by an indissoluble life.

Israel was called to be a kingdom of priests, and Israel was gathered round Aaron as a high priest, and the argument in the letter to the Hebrews is that the value of Aaron's high priesthood at most could only be for a day. Therefore Israel's place as a kingdom of priests could only be a temporary thing because it rested upon something which was only of time, because Aaron himself had a nature and a life for which offering for sin had to be made. He had a corruptible life, and the writer of the letter to the Hebrews says that he had to offer sacrifices for himself as well as for the people because of the nature that was in him. He himself, and his work, and the people were all subject to death because all were subject to that corruption that was in them.

The force of this presentation of finality in the priestly person of the Lord Jesus is this, that that is the kind of kingdom which is coming to us, which is offered to us, into which we are brought through Christ. It is the kingdom of an incorruptible nature, and an indissoluble life, which absolutely rules out death and corruption and all those elements which undermine the stability of the universe. The stability of God's new universe rests upon what Jesus is as to His nature and as to the life which He possesses. It does not rest upon anything at all that is corruptible, or anything that is capable of changing, of passing. This is the unshakeable Kingdom, rooted in the very person of the Lord Jesus, and what that person is as after the power of an endless life, an indissoluble life. I think it is a very striking phrase: “… but made like unto the Son of God … after the power of an indissoluble life”.

Do you see, then, that in which our salvation stands, upon which it rests? First of all upon the priestly person. You cannot rightly value the priestly work of the Lord Jesus until you have rightly grasped the priestly person, because the work that He does is done out of what He is, and is therefore like Him; that is, it partakes of the very same elements and constituents. A great thing to rest upon is the person of our Priest. It is not first of all resting upon something that He has done; it is first of all resting upon Himself and what He is. This One who was appointed heir of all things, through whom the ages were made, who was the very effulgence of the Father's person, the very expression of the Father's image - that One became Priest and His office was shot through and through with what He was Himself. Now, give to the priestly office the values of the very effulgence of God, the express image of the Father's person, the Maker of the ages, and the Heir of all things, and you endue priesthood with something that is altogether outside of the changes and the course of this world.

That sounds very great, very high, very exalted, but unless you get hold of it you are going to be shaken. This is the point. The Lord's people need to be established. The Lord has in view here the establishing of His people by way of shakings, and they can only be established as they see what their foundation is, and the foundation is not something which belongs to time, it is something right outside of time. It is not something which is subject to death; it is altogether outside of death. Nothing in the course of this present world's history can touch it, because it cannot touch Him.

Take chapter 9 verse 12. There is contrast in those words between Aaron who went in once a year with the blood of goats and calves, every year going in. Therefore whatever redemption was represented in that blood and in that entering in, was at most only a yearly thing. But now here is the Lord Jesus, said to have entered by His own blood once for all, once for ever, having obtained, not a twelve monthly redemption, but eternal redemption; so that His priestly work has the element of finality in it in regard to redemption. Our redemption is perfect.

Or look again at chapter 10 verse 12. Punctuation does not matter in this passage. It says here: “But he, when he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, (the comma comes there) sat down on the right hand of God”. You could put the comma in another place: “… when he had offered one sacrifice for sins, for ever sat down …”. No one knows where the comma should come, but it does not matter. The point is that once for all He offered a sacrifice for sins, and redemption became an accomplished fact. These are the constituents of the unshakeable Kingdom. But there is no chance in this; there is no speculation about it. It is not a question of how things will turn out: it is done, it is finished, it is perfected for ever in Christ. That is redemption.

Now that is a most important thing to grasp. Are you pleading with the Lord to sanctify you? It is not until you receive and thank God that the Holy Spirit is released that you know it, because until you do that you are putting things back generations, and you are virtually saying that what the Lord Jesus Christ did He has not done. If you asked me for a coin, and I put that coin on the table for you, and then you kept asking me for the coin, and I said to you: Well, there it is on the table, you may take it! But you still ignored the coin and kept asking me to give it to you, I should wonder what was the matter with you. Nothing must be taken away, even by inference or suggestion, from the perfection of His work: it is done, and you see the whole call of this book is for faith. The great appeal of this book is for faith. We will come to that again, but faith is not that God will do something but that He has done something and we rest upon something that is done. Our whole attitude has got to be that of those for whom everything is an accomplished fact. We have been sanctified once for all.

Look again at chapter 10 verse 14. We are building things up. It is as though he said, “It takes your breath away to know that you have been sanctified; now then, I will see that you have nothing at all to stand upon; I will go beyond that and say that, being sanctified, you are also perfected for ever.” Can this be true? Do we read it rightly: “For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified”? He has just said that we are sanctified; now he says we are not only sanctified but also perfected for ever. Our perfection is an accomplished fact in Christ.

We very often hear and speak of our identification with Christ in death. We say so often that when He died we died with Him. What do we mean? We define that in this way: we say He died as us, not only for us but also as us, that when He died God saw us dead in Him. And then we say when He rose we were raised together with Him, and God saw us risen in Him, or saw Him as us risen, and called upon us to reckon ourselves to be alive unto God in Christ. That identification matter spreads over all these things. Is He sanctified? So are we. Is He perfected? So are we. We are before God what He is before God: that is the ground for faith, and that is unshakeable ground.

Then look at chapter 2 verse 10: “For it became him, for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory” (the Revised Version margin reads: “having brought many sons to glory”). You can read it which way you like: “… in bringing many sons to glory …”, or “having brought many sons to glory …”. It is only a part of the whole comprehensive truth. Is He in glory? So are we. What is the basis of our glorification? It is that He is already glorified. On what ground shall we be glorified? On the ground that He is glorified as the guarantee. Now what was the point of the Lord Jesus going all this way - redemption, sanctification, perfection, glory? The point is that it is not for Himself. There is no need, there never was any need, for Him to go that way for Himself. He went that way for us.

Our preservation rests upon His ever living, His living ever, and making intercession for us. I am quite sure you will agree that if our preservation rested upon our prayers it would be a very fitful kind of experience, but, blessed be God, this is in Him as all other things are in Him. He is alive for ever, and alive for ever making intercession for the saints. There are things which are tremendous facts in our history, of which we have no consciousness, and this is one of them. Explain why it is that we are here today: why there is that going on, that persisting, that enduring, that coming through. It is a miracle how the saints, how the church, survives. Explain why our faith has not failed, why we have not gone out in view of the excessive pressure and trial. Why do we go on, with all the suffering and all the difficulty? It is not due to us; it is not due to anything here. This is the answer: He makes intercession! Do you think that such a one as He is, being in the relationship that He has to the Father, being the Son of God's love, any prayer of His will not be answered? Do you think that He prays futile prayers, that He does not pray according to the will of God? The assurance is that prayer according to the will of God will be answered: it cannot be otherwise. Does He ever pray other than according to the will of God? No, His prayers are prevailing for us, and when we get through there finally to the glory it will just be due to His having been holding on for us all the time.

Now these things are brought to us cumulatively and they are presented as the constituents of an unshakeable Kingdom, and the Holy Spirit would say to us through this word: Fasten your faith upon these things and you will be unshakeable; get these things under your feet as your foundation, and you will abide for ever; receive the Kingdom that cannot be shaken, receive the fact that redemption is accomplished, sanctification is accomplished, perfection is accomplished, glory is accomplished; intercession is effective and triumphant; preservation rests with Him and not with us.

There is the other side, that what is true in Him has got to be made true in us, and God is making it true in us. The redemption that is in Christ Jesus is going on in those who believe, and we are moving daily to that day when the finality which has been reached in Him will be reached in us. His Body has been redeemed from corruption. “Thou wilt not suffer thy Holy One to see corruption.” He was redeemed from corruption in His Body. We are moving to the day when this corruptible shall put on incorruption in the day of the redemption of the Body. The earnest of the redemption of the Body is the Holy Spirit of His already redeemed Body. There is depth of truth and value in the Lord's Table that you and I have not grasped for practical purposes. When we take the loaf and testify that we are one loaf with Him, that we are joined with Him in His Body (“Take, eat: this is my Body, which is for you”, said He) what are we doing? We are laying hold by faith of the fact that we are to be made like unto His glorious Body, and in that giving of Himself by the Holy Spirit we have the earnest of a glorified body. So that by faith I live now upon the Body of Christ, redeemed, delivered from death, and that is the meaning of Romans 8:11. “If the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead be in you, he that raised up Jesus from the dead shall also quicken your mortal body by his Spirit who dwelleth in you.” The Spirit that redeemed Christ's Body from corruption is in us to quicken our mortal body, to deliver us now from premature corruption. It is the earnest of our bodies being made like unto His glorious Body, the Holy Spirit in us. By faith now we accept the values of Christ's Body having been delivered from corruption. The Holy Spirit sustains us here on the principle of what Christ has gone through, and where He is. We are by the Spirit linked with what Christ is and how Christ is.

I have only singled that out as a very practical illustration, the realm of the redemption of the body. What is true there is true on all these points. Do I want to know in Him sanctification, as I want to know in my body redemption from corruption? Then I must by faith take Christ as my sanctification, and the Holy Spirit operates on that. I do not ask the Lord to do something called sanctification; I ask the Lord to make good in me the sanctification which is already perfected in His Son. It is living on Christ in every respect by faith, and the Holy Spirit, the active, intelligent agent, gets to work to make good in us that which our faith appropriates, that which we lay hold of by faith. And so here is finality in Christ as to His priestly work.

This letter makes it perfectly clear that there is responsibility on the side of the Lord's people in connection with all that we have been saying, the priestly person and the priestly work of the Lord Jesus. Responsibility runs right through this letter, but responsibility is related to this secured and available completeness, and the relation to that is one of progressiveness. Responsibility rests upon our progressiveness in this which is a completed work for us. The urge here is, “Let us go on”, or “Let us be going on.” As we are found in a state of going on to full growth the Lord places to our account everything. It is a question of progressive receiving or forfeiting the Kingdom which cannot be shaken.

On the one hand the call is: “Wherefore, holy brethren, partners in a heavenly calling …”; “We are made partakers with Christ if …”. There are a lot of provisional things in this letter, and if you read them by themselves it will make you feel that everything is uncertain, is not as settled as we have been saying, but that is purely the side of responsibility, and responsibility is all gathered up into one thing - going on, and Israel is taken as an illustration of people who did not go on. Their hearts went back; they did not go on; they stopped. You can see them as a people who are not by any means pressing on, and they perished in the wilderness. They are taken as an example and as a warning.

Now all the warnings, and all those provisional elements in this letter are connected with God's full end, not with our salvation but with God's full end. They are connected with the inheritance, with the Kingdom, and in a word what is said here is: You may miss the Kingdom, you may lose the Kingdom, you may not lose your salvation but you may lose the Kingdom; and there are the strongest things in all the Scriptures said here. Terrible things are said in chapter 10 and they are only to be explained in the light of the Kingdom which is to be received. “If any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him. But we are not of them that draw back unto perdition ….” That sounds strong. That sounds like the loss of salvation. Then, Israel came out of Egypt on the ground of shed and sprinkled blood, the blood of a covenant. They became God's people, they perished in the wilderness, and that wilderness perishing was a perdition indeed. Later the remnant, the new generation, went into the land, possessed it, and they again ceased to go on and God sent them away into Babylon, and Babylon was perdition. They did not cease to be the Lord's people, but they were in perdition. A remnant came back, and in the remnant there were those who went on: “Then they that feared the Lord spake often one to another, and the Lord hearkened and heard, and a book of remembrance was written before him … and they shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in the day wherein I do make a peculiar treasure.” They went on, but where do you find them at the end of the New Testament, and where do you find them in the days of the Lord Jesus? Where is this Israel now? The Lord Jesus, God's final speech, appeared in their midst; God speaks at the end of the times in His Son. They did not go on. They drew back. I ask you whether Israel has been in perdition since the year seventy? Is Israel in perdition today? What word describes better the state of the historic Israel, the Jews, today? Is it not perdition? But are they not still that distinctive race? Have they not yet a future as God's people? Have they ever been cut off? That would contradict Romans to start with. It would contradict Ezekiel. But are they not in perdition? “We are not of those who draw back unto perdition”; “… my soul shall have no pleasure in him.” It is terribly true, the Lord's attitude towards Israel when they drew back from His Son. How could Israel go through that awful experience of the year seventy, and the awful experience since, if the Lord's soul had pleasure in them? No, it is concerning the Kingdom. We may lose the Kingdom if we may not lose our salvation.

“The rest of the dead lived not again for a thousand years.” There is a different resurrection for the Kingdom, and we may miss it. Responsibility is not for our salvation, our redemption, our sanctification. He has taken responsibility for that. The responsibility is that we can go on in what He has done and we make progress in what is an accomplished thing for us, and as we do that the whole question of responsibility is settled, is answered, and we come by the obedience of faith to the realisation of the truth that He has accomplished it all: it is for us through faith. So faith becomes a great word in this letter, and faith is linked with this progressive attitude, looking on and going on. It was unbelief, says the apostle, that brought Israel to perdition in the wilderness, to a standstill. Faith would have meant that they went on to the Kingdom. So the Lord calls strongly to us to recognise that the Kingdom is constituted by all these elements of finality, and we are called by faith to receive the Kingdom, to go on to full growth, and not to draw back, not to turn aside, not to allow doubt and unbelief to creep in and paralyse our walk so that we cease to go on. Finality in connection with the calling and position of the Lord's people as to responsibility is here: He has accomplished everything for us, and we by faith must go on in the accomplished thing. So shall we be established, unshakeable.

Our attitude has to be a very practical one from day to day. We are not yet in ourselves perfect. We discover that as we go on more and more how imperfect we are, how far from wholly sanctified. But if, when that reality comes upon us strongly and sternly, with all its discouragement and despair, we take that on, if we sit down under that, if we regard that as the final thing, then it is perdition, we shall know it. But if we take this attitude, even today, when for some reason we are smitten again with the imperfection, the lack of sanctification; if we turn to the Lord and say, “Lord, this is me, it is not You; You are other than this. You are not as I am; I take anew my position by faith in what you are. I step off of the ground of what I am and on to the ground of what you are!”, we shall discover that the Holy Spirit comes in on that, and we shall know comfort, and find release, deliverance and uplift.

You could take the other two courses of just accepting that, and sit down and be miserable for the rest of the day, or the rest of your days; or you could begin to struggle and strive to get out of your mire, out of your slough, deploring that you got in and you had so often got in, and you are going to make another effort. You will not get very far either way: you will be dragging along. But if you take Christ's ground by faith, repudiate your ground and take His ground by faith, and tell the Lord that He is altogether other than you are and you take the ground of what He is by faith, then the Holy Spirit will deliver you, you will find help and deliverance, you will find yourself lifted with new comfort, new strength, and, what is more, new energy to go on, and you will not so easily get into that mire again. You will grow so that the mire is left more and more behind. The Holy Spirit is working on the ground of what Jesus is.

Take the matter of going to bed at night just enjoying the Lord, full of the blessedness of the Lord, all at peace with the Lord, no cloud between you and the Lord; you simply go to bed and you go to sleep, and in the morning you wake up to find that all the blessedness has flown, somehow or other everything is as though it had never been, and you have got to start all over again: it is as though you had got to start the Christian life again. Sometimes we have the blessed experience of waking up in the morning in the joy of the Lord, and everything is clear, but that is not always so. We may have the most blessed fellowship with the Lord last thing at night, and simply the bottom has fallen out of everything through the night, and it is like starting the Christian life all over again in the morning. We may be irritable, we may be anything, not feeling a bit like a Christian: everything is topsy-turvy. What are we going to do? Are we going to raise questions about this Christianity, that it is not certain, not stable, variable, and so on? Or are we going to succumb to these feelings, these sensations, this situation, this condition of things and have a wretched day because we feel like that today, that is how we are today; it is a bad day and so we go through a bad day? What is going to happen? It is very real sometimes, you feel just about as evil as you can feel, and you have all the reasons for asking the questions as to whether you are a Christian at all.

The cause may be any one of a number of things. It may be the Devil himself is anticipating something: he has a sense of something coming which is of value to the Lord, and he has come in and right from your waking consciousness he is surrounding you with a black cloud of evil enmity and is pressing that upon you to frustrate and defeat something for God. But whatever the reason is there is the fact: you feel bad, and everything argues that you are bad. What is your way out? I will tell you how I have found deliverance. I have turned to the Lord and said, Lord, You are not this; You are other than this. You do not change from night to morning; there is no variableness with You. You are not subject to all these elements which give us these different and varying sensations: You are the same Lord, just the same, unchanging, unchangeable. Last night You were love, and You are love this morning; last night You were peace, and You are peace this morning; last night You were joy, and You are joy this morning. You are outside of all this, Lord; I take my stand on what You are, and repudiate what I am, and all this. I forsake this ground and take my place in You as other than this.

The words of verse 5 in chapter 2 can bear a slightly improved translation, and would be more correctly translated if put in this way: “Not unto angels did he subject the inhabited earth to come of which we are speaking”. So that what is being spoken of in this letter is the dominion of the inhabited earth to come, a Kingdom which cannot be shaken. Those two things, one at the beginning of the letter and the other at the end, are related to the same thing, and all that lies between the two passages represents the basis of that Kingdom which cannot be shaken over the inhabited earth to come.

Then you go right through the Bible and you find that redemptive programme being set forth in many ways, in types, figures, symbols, prophecy, representation, and then carried out in actuality in the coming, in the person and in the work of the Son of God, concerning whom this letter to the Hebrews says at its beginning: “God ... appointed Him heir of all things.” And you come at length to the end of this world's history, gathered up in the book of the Revelation, and there at the beginning of the book you find the redemptive programme consummated: “Unto him that loveth us, and loosed us from our sins ...”; “… who redeemed us unto God by his own blood ...”. The redemptive programme consummated, and dominion for ever established.

That is the Bible, but it is wonderful to notice that this one single letter in the entire Bible covers all that ground in itself. Here it opens with the eternal intention, “Thou madest him to have dominion”; and then it is seen that that dominion was forfeited. Then through a large section of the letter the redemptive programme is unfolded, the High Priestly person and work of the Lord Jesus; and then, “Receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken ...”; dominion established, never again to be forfeited or lost. This letter to the Hebrews is a remarkable book.

There, then, is God's purpose, and that purpose is governing all God's dealings with men, and that purpose lies behind every divine activity, and it is to govern and lie behind all our spiritual concerns for ourselves and for others. The purpose of God in this dispensation, since the redemptive work was accomplished in Christ by His cross, is to call out of the nations a people to be prepared and fitted to reign. It is not just to call out a people to be saved. That is only related. That is only a fragment, an essential and indispensable step towards the end, but no end in itself. The message of the Gospel is not just the message that man may be forgiven and saved from his sins. The full message of the Gospel is that man is called to occupy a place of dominion in the ages to come, that man is called into the place which God eternally intended that he should occupy, for which God created man, that he might have dominion. That is the message, and that has to govern all our concern, our interest and our activity, and that has got to shape our mentality with regard to God's dealings with us.

That, of course, is a phase which comes later in our consideration, but if we want an explanation for God's ways, God's methods with His people, and an adequate objective in seeking the salvation of men, it is this: God had a purpose, a high, a great, a glorious purpose in creating man. The explanation of man's very existence is in the eternal counsels of God, and it is here set forth in these words: Not unto angels, but unto man, did He subject the inhabited earth to come of which we are speaking. If we want to understand why God deals with us as He does, why the people of God are subjected by Himself to such fiery trials and to such a course of difficulty and suffering, the explanation is here: he is chosen to reign, and he has got to learn how to reign and what reigning is. Oh, the Gospel is a great thing, and that is why here at the end of this letter, as it first of all introduces and presents the great purpose of God from eternity concerning man, and then unfolds with such fulness the great redemptive work, with all its cost, with all its wonder, with all its power, it is all summed up in this way: “How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation?”

What is so great salvation? It is not just our salvation from our sin, not just our salvation from hell. That is a great thing, but it is our salvation back into all that mighty thought of God before the world was, when He said - or when They said - “Let us make man …”; “Thou madest him to have dominion.” That is the so great salvation. How shall we escape if we voluntarily antagonise, positively resist, say vehemently, We will not have it? No! None of that is necessary - neglect! Fail to give heed to so great salvation! That is the purpose, the great object of God from eternity, that the people of God shall with the Son of God be a reigning people in His Kingdom which is for ever and ever. You notice how first of all the Son and His Kingdom are introduced, and then man is brought in: “For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee?” “Thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity; - see the crown of His Kingdom, the crown of His exaltation; it is by reason of what He has done in His cross - therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.” He is brought in as heir of all things, appointed by the Father, and given a Throne which is for ever and ever, and a kingdom of righteousness. And then: “What is man that Thou makest mention of him, or the son of man that Thou puttest him in charge?” You see believers, the people of God, are brought there into relation with the Son in His Kingdom to reign, and so the second chapter goes on with that relatedness: “For it became him for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings. For both he that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren …”. They in oneness with Him, in family relationship, are to have dominion. That leads us right on to chapter 12: “Wherefore, receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken …”.

Now there is one other thing that is explained by this. It is that persistent, dogged effort in all its many-sidedness of the whole kingdom of Satan to prevent the people of God from reaching their divinely intended end. That effort begins with the Lord Jesus Himself; that is, in depriving Him of His Lordship. You and I must more and more be impressed with this one tremendous thing, that the main note, the dominant note, the supreme feature of our life and ministry, our testimony and our position as the Lord's people, is in relation to the absolute Lordship of Jesus Christ. The great declaration of the commencement of this dispensation made by Peter on the Day of Pentecost was: “God hath made this Jesus, whom ye crucified, both Lord and Christ, a Prince and a Saviour.” This was the note, mark you, that opened the dispensation; this was the note and the proclamation which, on the one hand, resulted in the gathering in of men, the Holy Spirit's mighty operation in relation to the church; and, on the other hand, which caused the fury of the adversary to break upon the church. That is the supreme note of the dispensation, and if you follow on through the book of the Acts you will see that it was on that note that the Holy Spirit came and did His mighty work. Again, at Caesarea with Peter, amongst the Gentiles, now not the Jews, the cry of Peter in the midst of that company was: “He is Lord of all”, and the Holy Spirit fell upon all those who were assembled together. That is the Holy Ghost's note for this dispensation. His Saviourhood is a great thing, but His Lordship is greater. His Saviourhood is in a sense only incidental, because it comes in by reason of what has taken place in sin; but His Lordship is eternal, back to eternity and on to eternity. That is the Lordship of Jesus Christ against which the enemy is set, and we know quite well that it is not until we come to the place where the Lordship of Jesus Christ is established from centre to circumference of our lives that we come really into victory.

As we have already said, this issue of His Lordship is becoming more and more acute in the history of this world as the age nears its end; therefore, the call to the people of God, the call to believers, the call to the church that their need at the end of the dispensation is to be the need of His sovereignty, His sovereign Lordship. The Lord would work with us to bring us there, not just that somewhere remote in this universe, called heaven, Jesus is exalted, is enthroned; no, but that enthronement, that Lordship is a practical working factor in our lives inwardly and outwardly; that it is an expressed thing, a manifested thing, a ministered thing; that it is brought to bear upon situations, upon circumstances, upon need; that Jesus coming in the power of His Kingdom should register His mighty impact upon things here now. The Lordship of Jesus Christ is to be a practical, working thing.

Now the next thing that I feel should be mentioned in connection with the original purposes of God in Christ concerning man, is that unto the realisation of that purpose man has got to be prepared. The redemptive work has been accomplished in Christ. Here we are introduced to it at once: “Having accomplished purification of sins, sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high”. He tasted death on behalf of every man. The work has been done in Him. “He that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one.” On the ground of what He has done, and what has been done in Him, something has got to be done in the saints to bring them to the place that He now occupies. There has got to be the expression in us of that which has been accomplished in and by Him.

I want to gather that to one point: “He that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one.” The point is, What is sanctification in relation to the Kingdom, the Throne, dominion? It is very vitally related. There will be no reigning unless there is sanctification; there will be no dominion unless there is sanctification. Sanctification in Christ is the way to the dominion, to the reigning, to the realisation of God's eternal purpose. What is sanctification then with its tremendous significance for the purpose of God? It is a separation from all that which came in and, coming in, meant the forfeiture of that dominion which God intended.

But I am going to put that in another way. It is the breaking of the power and the stripping off of the whole natural life. The whole natural life of man now since the fall - since Satan's interference and man's response to Satan's interference - is in itself the great obstruction in the way to God's purpose in him and for him; and when I speak of the whole natural life I am not just speaking of that sinful life which everybody recognises and acknowledges to be evil. I am speaking about man as he is. According to this world's standards, and according to the best standards of men, he may be called a good man, but God says: “There is none righteous, no not one.” And the great apostle himself said: “In me, that is in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.” That lies behind our religious life very often. Our very religious life can be energised by nature. Our interests for the Lord may be by the energy of our own natural life, and so we find the flesh sporting itself in the things of God, a kind of natural interest carried over into divine things: that just as you might be taken up with interesting things in this world, and study them, and apply them, and use them, and turn them to certain account for the furtherance of certain interests, so you have swung all the application of mind and heart and wisdom to the things that are divine, and you begin to manipulate things for God, and organise things for God, and govern things for God, and be something in the things of God. It is all the natural man brought over into divine things, which can be interesting, fascinating. Yes, the deep things of God making an appeal to that in us which can be so fascinated, things such as prophecy, the things to come. Oh, the fascination of prophecy!

I shall never forget the shock that came to me once across the other side of the Atlantic. I was due to speak in a city there, and I arrived on the closing evening of a series of meetings on prophecy and was in the last meeting. I was to open my own series of gatherings at the end of that last meeting, and I listened to the address on prophecy, on the signs of the times and so on, and I saw the people all down with their notebooks, going at it as hard as they could go, noting down all these things, tabulating all these interesting facts, all this data about prophecy. They were very interested and very busy, and then that finished. I had been very much wai