Truth or Mysticism, Which?
Henry H. McCarthy
Table of Contents
Truth or Mysticism, Which?
H. H. McCarthy
There are things, good and evil, which never mingle with one another, but always keep in their own company. On the one hand, faith and confidence are inseparable companions; and, on the other, incredulity and mysticism are always found in the same fog of confusion.
Faith never takes counsel with what one feels, or thinks, or concludes, neither does it make one’s own state (that is what Scripture calls “Christ in us”) its object, because no object suits faith but the truth, which is Christ outside of oneself who has shown what God is by direct revelation, and all evil by its opposition to Himself. Christ, not God, is said to be the truth, because “the truth” is that which is told of something else. But God is never said to be the expression of anything else. It is only in Man that God makes Himself seen and known, therefore Christ is said to be the truth as to God, and “the image of the invisible God”; for it is only in Christ that God can be really known. Hence He says: “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in Me.” Therefore faith and confidence are always on the same high level with the truth, now become “the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,” that is, the expression of God’s satisfaction in the work which has recovered sinners for Himself, not only “made meet for the light,” according to the glory of His own nature, but suited for Him to have His delights in companionship with recovered man, in a way that such intimacies between God and man in innocence never could have been known.
On the other hand, INCREDULITY seeks to find something within oneself to reason from, and looks to get from God a testimony to one’s own state, instead of the testimony He always delights to give of His blessed Son, the sufficiency of His grace, and His strength made perfect in weakness. Hence incredulity and mysticism are always on the same low level, in search to get need met elsewhere than by “the truth as it is in Jesus,” — craving for a satisfaction, never in this way to be possessed or enjoyed, but often talking of one’s own happiness, which is a sure sign that happiness is its object, instead of Christ. In short, faith feeds upon an object outside of oneself, which is the truth — God’s precious Christ, who satisfies fully, deeply, infinitely; whilst incredulity seeks an object for complacency within, which comes to mysticism, or something in man always craving, and never fully satisfied. It is thus we get a test, by which we may always distinguish between truth and mysticism.
We are taught in Galatians, that “faith worketh by love.” Allow me to ask, whose love? Surely the love which never grows cold, which is Christ’s, not ours. The new man living by faith in this Object set before him and acting on him, becomes the intelligent expression of the love he feeds upon; but the instant the eye has for object any other than Christ for him — such as Christ in him for state, his progress, his holiness, or his testimony (although these cannot go on unless Christ, which forms his state, he in him) — faith becomes inactive, Christ the true object of faith being displaced.
It is written: “Whatsoever is not of faith is sin,” therefore if God were to sanction any object for faith than its own true one, God would be accommodating himself to sin by allowing it, which could not be.
We are told in Acts 15 that God purifies the heart by faith; but a state founded on the evidence of anything we find in ourselves does not purify the heart, for even that which is wrought in us by the Holy Ghost, which we can be pleased with, is not an object for faith. The new life cannot live on itself; it must have a positive object outside of itself to sustain its own nature; for in every case of a moral creature, that which is objective is the source of the subjective state. Our hearts, therefore, are being purified by faith which conducts us into the heart of God, beholds His unveiled “glory in the face of Jesus Christ,” and feeds upon its own object.
In Romans 10, we are taught that faith cometh by report, but report by God’s Word. What a relief to be taken away from myself altogether, feelings and all! the report being God’s testimony concerning His Son (1 John 5:6-12). Observe, it is not believing anything because I feel it, but believing everything that God say, because God says it. Thus what God is and says produces, sustains, and energizes faith: so that thus, there is always divine confidence, for when faith is active in the soul, one loves goodness, not in oneself but in Another, and appropriates that which one loves, namely, a wonderful character of goodness in Christ, which meets one’s own want of it. Whereas incredulity is always mystical in its love of goodness, for the mischief of it is, although it loves goodness, yet it loves it in oneself — in the creature, instead of in Christ — which comes to this, that nothing is being appropriated by the drawings of faith from its own external Object, and all its imaginary goodness is only a more subtle species of self.
Witness the thief on the cross. There was the blessed Lord before him, suffering for his sins: this was the objective truth. Then there was the work of the Spirit of God in him, by which his faith penetrated through the deep humiliation of Jesus, and discovered Him to be the Son of God about to come in His kingdom: this was the subjective response within to the blessed fact without.
See another instance of the same principle in Saul of Tarsus, which gives us a more wonderful transfiguration than the one on the mount. We get “a blasphemer and persecutor” transfigured into a bosom friend of the One before him, as object, by the subjective action of the Spirit of God within him. The transfiguration on the mount did not need the cross, but in the case of every one of us, the cross was necessary to transfigure enemies of Jesus into His bosom friends.
I ask, if such an One was necessary as Object for the Holy Ghost to bring about such a result, is not Jesus equally necessary, as Object, for the Holy Ghost to unfold His glories to us as our own. Alas! alas! that saints should make their own state their object, instead of Christ ministered to us by the Holy Ghost! It is amazing how saints seek to get something for self: some are seeking, for self, what they call “the gold promised to Laodicea,” others what they call the testimony, others devotedness and holiness for self; not seeing that self never has, and never can, cross the Jordan at all, at all. In fact, when any thing, no matter what, becomes an object for self, it is a sure sign that Christ has never been taken instead of self, and thus saints get enveloped in clouds of mystical piety, instead of being in the enjoyment of the truth of God.
Ans. The question is to my mind a profound mistake — that the testimony they bear is the governing object in the minds of the saints. It is no new thought to me; but what I have insisted on, I know not how long — some thirty or forty years — that wherever an assembly, or those within the assembly, set Out to bear a testimony, they will be a testimony to their own weakness and inefficiency; because the object of their walk cannot be one which efficiently forms a Christian. When they have a right one, they will be a testimony, but to be one is never the first object.
To have Christ — I mean practically to walk with Him and after Him, to have communion with the Father and the Son, to walk in unfeigned obedience and lowliness, to live in realized dependence on Christ and have His secret with us, and realize the Father’s love, to have our affections set on things above, to walk in patience yet in confidence through this world — this is what we have to seek. If we realize it we shall be a testimony, whether individually or collectively, but in possessing the things themselves; and they form us, through grace, so that we are one (that is, a testimony). But seeking, or setting up to be it, does not. Moses did not seek to have his face shine, nor even know when it did; but when he had been with God, it shone.
Whenever Christians, so far as I have seen, set up to be a testimony, they get full of themselves, and lose the sense that they are so (that is, full of themselves), and fancy it is having much of Christ. A shining face never sees itself. The true heart is occupied with Christ, and in a certain sense and measure self is gone. The right thought is not to think of self at all — save as we have to judge it. You cannot think of being a testimony save of your being so, and this is thinking of self, and, as I have said before, it is what I have always seen to bring declension. — J.N.D.)
We will now turn to a few other Scriptures which mark the distinction between these principles of objective and subjective truth, so that we may appropriate God’s thoughts and have them as our own for these divine facts. First, we get God’s thoughts in His own Word — they are His; then, receiving them from Himself, they are the same in us. We thus see that objective truth is the way God reveals Himself in Christ, who is the positive expression of God before man, and Man before the eyes of God, who brings into evidence all that is contrary to God, and through atonement becomes the Purger of our sins in the glory. Then we find that subjective truth is that which is produced in us by the Holy Ghost, who does not speak from Himself, as independent of the Father and the Son, but He glorifies Jesus in taking of His moral graces and in showing them to us as our own, for there is not a moral beauty in Christ that is not in every believer indwelt by the Holy Ghost. It is thus that He creates in our consciences and affections a response to the objective truth presented, and by this means makes believers the effects of God’s testimony to the work in which He has been perfectly glorified and fully revealed. But observe that this subjective action is only carried on by placing an object for faith before the soul, as the Lord said: “When He (the Holy Ghost) is come, he shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine and shall show it unto you.”
In Romans 5:1 we read: “Therefore being justified by faith we have peace with God,” and so forth. Here we have objective faith producing subjective peace; and these must never be separated nor confounded. The word “therefore” takes us back to the end of chapter iv, where we get the object of this faith, namely, the attestation of God to the work of Christ on our behalf, for whom it was accomplished. In Romans 5:5, we get our subjective state again referred to, namely: “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us,” but we are instantly taken to the objective truth in Romans 5:6-8, namely, the love that saves, which is greater than the things given, for this is the means by which God the Holy Ghost produces a subjective response which suits the Father’s affections. Thus this love, set before us in the Person of Christ, is not only the source, but the intimate Object of our new and dependent life, by which the subjective state becomes developed and holiness produced, for holiness is the development of love.
Another has justly remarked that the fifth chapter of Romans goes beyond the eighth, because in the former we get the reconciliation of an enemy, which brings out more of what God is in Himself, than the favors which He confers on a friend as seen throughout the eighth chapter. Therefore, as the love described in the fifth chapter, as brought out at the cross, is the deepest expression that God could give of His own heart and nature, one is made to feel the danger of leaving “first love” by any pleasing occupation with our own subjective state, which is never more healthy and active than when absorbed by that of which the cross is the expression, always bearing in mind that it is only after we have known the saving power of the wonderful cross that the Holy Ghost unfolds to us its moral glories; for instead of having as object for faith our own happiness, or any personal distinction conferred upon us, it is Christ Himself, whose glory and whose saints can never be separated, who alone must be the source of our peaceful delight.
And not only is this true in principle now, but it will be true when we reach Him on high, for then the Holy Ghost will never have to employ His power in making us judge self as He has to do now when we are reluctant to do so, but to intensify our delight in the Father and the Son.
It may simplify this by giving an illustration in a question once put to me by a faithful servant now in the enjoyment of what it is to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord. The substance of the question was: In Revelation 4:4, there are the saints, after the rapture, represented in the elders as being with Christ, like Christ, seated on thrones with crowns on their heads: is there anything beyond that? I replied oh, no, how could there be anything beyond that! He then said, read the tenth verse, where you will see that no expression of righteous judgment, such as thunderings, lightenings, and so forth, could move those saints, because their place in the glory is the consequence of the judgment having been endured for them by the Lord, therefore in all the majesty of that scene enjoying ineffable peace, they observe perfect stillness, until the time comes for Christ’s praises to be celebrated, but then they are all in motion: they leave their thrones, they take off their crowns, in order to have a higher privilege, and a deeper joy of casting them at His feet and swelling His praises in that heavenly scene. Now, tell me, which would you prefer? Is it not a higher privilege to be worshipping Jesus than to be in honor oneself? Oh, my reader, let your heart, set in motion by redeeming love, answer that question, and thus know deliverance from the flimsy spinnings of the mystic mind of man, so as to be free for the enjoyment of the pure truth of God, seen in present and eternal redemption glory of His own Son. It will be all truth up there; but saints ought not to allow the devil to cheat them out of the truth with mysticism down here.
In Galatians 1:12,15-16 (verses 13-14 forming a kind of parenthesis), we read first of the revelation of Christ in glory to, then of the revelation of His Son in the apostle, that is, Christ is the object of faith first, and then He becomes the power of life in the vessel, when, as we read elsewhere, deep exercises of conscience had been gone through. This is always the order, first “we see Jesus crowned with glory and honour,” in absolute perfection and blessedness, and this objective perception of faith in Him produces its own subjective effect in us; and these must never be separated, nor can they be, whilst faith in its own blessed Object continues active; for it is thus that the producing cause always remains the sustaining power.
The truth being received into the heart, it is Christ that is received, and this humbles me, because it has to do with the evil that is in me; then it is not only Christ as object outside of me, but a living Christ in me. But a mere external knowledge, that has no power over the conscience, only puffs up (1 Cor. 8:1). When, however, the evil within is discovered and judged by the conscience, I possess Christ as part of my own moral being, my senses being exercised to discern between good and evil, between what is Christ and what is me, as long as I am in this body with sin in me; so that when Christ is thus received, it is as if He were saying to me, I have settled all the question for you between the old thing and God, and now you settle the question for me between the new thing versus the world, the flesh, and the devil. And this is only practically done in dying daily, by “always bearing “about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body.” So that this is the only way practically to rise above the evil, (self) as God is above it.
“We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10). This passage evidently refers to the newly-created character by which Christ is exhibited in His saints, or subjective truth; for that which becomes of such value to God is not the amount of work we think we do, but the measure of Christ we present to others, in the lowliness, the gentleness, and the grace which He exhibited when here. (Compare John 1:18, and 1 John 4:12). And I need not say, Christ must be in the vessel by occupation with Him, outside of the vessel, in order to produce these beauteous graces in the place from which He has been ejected, otherwise it would be only improved self, that is, a kind of mystical mixture, something mongrel. When the pure rain falls from heaven on earth, if they mix, mud is formed, which, in figure, does not represent the truth.
In 2 Corinthians 3:4, we get another forcible teaching, showing the distinction between objective and subjective truth, and the impossibility of separating them whilst faith lays hold of the former, because the communication of the truth, through faith, creates us into the image of that which it communicates.
But, before examining this, let me first guard my reader against a very subtle error which has been propounded in reference to the subject of these chapters, and which is the consequence of mixing up two things totally distinct.
May I refer to a well-known Roman Catholic book, entitled “Milner’s End of Religious Controversy,” which will help us to distinguish two things totally distinct in the subject before us. All the arguments in this book are built upon false premises, namely, “a rule of faith, or the means of communicating the Christian religion.” Those two things are totally distinct: separate them, and all the erroneous superstructure of this book falls to pieces. A mother communicates the truth to her child, but she is not a rule of faith for the child. So also as to the subject which the apostle treats of in the two chapters under our consideration. “The glory that excelleth,” and “which remaineth,” in contradistinction to “that which is done away,” is not the same thing as the apostolic authority and gift which announces it, or in other words, the subject which the gospel treats of, and the personal ministry which announces it, are totally distinct things. Some people lump these two into one and the same thing, and reject both, on the erroneous supposition that because we have not got the personal apostolic gift, we have not got “the glory which excelleth,” and “which remaineth,” either. Admit these to be one and the same thing, and you fall into a somewhat similar snare as that of Milner; separate them, and all mysticism, and difficulty, built upon their false union, vanish. Moreover, to deny that we have “the glory that excelleth,” and “which remaineth,” for faith, as much as the apostle had it, would be really tantamount to call in question apostolic authority itself, and thus deny the inspiration of the Scriptures, for which the Holy Ghost used the apostles as His pens to leave inspired Scripture with us; and this would also throw us back upon apostolic succession. The apostles were the engineers, so to speak: they made the road, that is, they were used to establish Christianity; and we are simple travelers on the road already made: we do not pretend to be engineers, but we do know, as travelers, that the road is a good one.
In 1 Corinthians 3, we get three things, namely, the revelation of things to the apostle by the Holy Ghost, the way of communicating them to us by the Holy Ghost, and the way of our receiving them by the Holy Ghost, that is, first, the source from which it comes to the apostle; secondly, the medium of communication, or the Scriptures, “communicating spiritual things by spiritual means;” thirdly, “spiritually discerned,” that is, the way of our receiving the communications; so that all, from the source and issue, to our reception of the truth, are by the Holy Ghost. There is, therefore, no succession in receiving the truth; it is the contrast to succession, because we get the truth direct from God Himself, instead of from man. If only from man, then it would not be from God. If you interfere with my receiving what God says direct from His Word, — it is God’s authority and title to address me — you are interfering with, not mine, for I have no authority, but only to do as I am told.
The conscience, never allows anything to come between itself and God (Heb. 4:12). It is the truth which, commands the conscience, controls it, and makes it perfect, because the truth is God’s testimony to the efficiency of Atonement, of which Christ is now the display. It is the unveiled glory of God in accomplished, eternal redemption — a wonderful blessed truth that there is now, for faith, no veil on the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, and no veil on the eye of faith that sees it. It is this that makes us superior to evil, even to the evil that is in us.
Every saint with an awakened conscience is brought into a spiritual combat between good and evil, the knowledge of which we have acquired, through the fall. There are two powerful principles — the one of good, the other of evil — in every believer, so that we must either rise above the evil as God is above it, by having Christ instead of self on the one hand; or, on the other, we shall be, if honest, miserable, if mystical, pharisaical in the combat.
But when the conscience is truly awakened, and when we are content to take Christ instead of self, then this Object set before us, and acting on us, takes us above the evil as God Himself is above it, by impregnating us, in the power of the Holy Ghost, with the meaning of the unveiled glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, which is set before our faith to feed upon in 2 Corinthians 3:18; 4:4,6.
In order to facilitate our spiritual understanding of what this blessed Object conveys, may we look at the way Scripture views Christ in three distinct ways, all culminating up to the present view we get of God’s unveiled glory in His face now.
First, then, Scripture shows Him to our faith before incarnation. We read of Him in John 1 — “In the beginning was the Word”: here we get His eternity. “And the Word was with God”: His personality, the Word was thus personally distinct. “And the Word was God”: His absolute Deity, that is, although distinct in Person, He was not distinct in nature. “The same was in the beginning with God,” that is, His personal distinction never had a commencement. This is He who was sent by the Father. The Son was there to be sent; and if you could think of a time when there was no Son, then there was no Father either. In verse 3 we get him as Creator of all things.
The second way Scripture views Him is in the lowliness of incarnation: “The Word became flesh,” “God was manifest in flesh.” But, observe, He is the same Person here as He was before He became a Man. When He had given up “the form of God,” according to Philippians ii, He never ceased to be He who had given it up. It is thus we find the moral glories of His humiliation far more wonderful than the dazzling brilliancies of those glories which He had with the Father before the world was, but which He had clothed with the humiliation and lowliness of the One who, “though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor, that ye through His poverty might be rich.” In this taken place as a Servant, He never claimed any of the rights due to His essential Deity, as His death proves, which was not the consequence of His natural state, but of His obedience to His Father for us. Yet He exercised His Godhead power for others, and over the winds and the waves for their sakes, though never for His own relief, either in the desert before the devil, or on the cross under the judgment for us.
Does not all this make His maintained and continuous humiliation so wonderful, bringing the adoring sense of His infinite stoop and holiness into our consciences and hearts? He walked alone in unapproachable holiness, and suffered alone on the cross, in order that He might not be alone in glory, according to what He said: “Except the grain of wheat fall into the ground and die it abideth alone” (JND).
“Yet it must be: Thy love had not its rest,
Were Thy redeemed not with Thee fully blest.
That love that gives not as the world, but shares
All it possesses with it loved co-heirs.”
But before we come to the present way in which Scripture views the Lord, we must glance at the cross, for in neither of the views we have been considering could He have blotted out one sin of ours; because in reference to the first view, the last resource of Godhead-power and majesty, for wickedness and rebellion, is destruction. And, in reference to the second, although His ministry was superior to all the power of the enemy, yet it did not work an eternal deliverance, because it did not touch the judgment of God. Nothing less than His death could accomplish an eternal redemption, because the wages of sin is death, and He took that for us, and paid the wages of our sin. So that, according to Scripture, we are thus reconciled to God, not by Christ’s living energies, nor by His living agonies, but “in the body of His flesh through death.” And this brings us to the present way Scripture looks at the Lord, who has created a place of acceptance for us, by entering into it Himself, and in His present risen state out of death, has become the life of every believer, quickened together with Him, as well as his righteousness before God. Righteousness, therefore, as another has said, is not what Christ did as a living Man, but God’s own character was glorified in His death, and our positive righteousness is according to what God’s nature is. So that righteousness is not in me — I shall never find it there — although there is an answer in my conscience to what Christ is now, for me, as righteousness before God, instead of my sins.
It is there, and only there, I get righteousness. It is God’s righteousness, but it is mine, too, because Christ is both. On the one hand it is God’s witness — Christ in glory — of His estimate of the work; on the other, it is my clearance from sin, and fitness for His presence — ”made meet for the light”: and these are measured by what Christ deserves at the hand of God, for having endured righteous judgment against sin, when He bore it in the place of sin, as made it, before God. This produces in the believer a response to the unveiled glory of God, which response is reconciliation; for reconciliation is based upon propitiation.
Now, allow me to call my readers’ attention to the three first views which Scripture has been bringing before us of the Lord’s varied glories before He entered into His present one, lest the workings of the human mind should be allowed to come in, and disconnect any of these from the redemption glory, for which the previous ones were necessary, and in which they have all culminated, as brought before us in 2 Corinthians 3:18 and 4:4,6, and which is designated in 2 Corinthians 3:10-11, as “the glory that excelleth,” and “that which remaineth.” The work done is worth this glory, so that it is the proof of the salvation of all who behold it. You can’t have so complete a proof as that the One who was on the cross bearing our sins, and confessing them as His own, is now in the glory, because they are gone.
The glory of God — of which Christ was the essence — and our sins, were brought into contact when God was dealing with them, therefore this very glory of God is our righteous introduction into His own presence, because our place there, and relationship with Him, answers precisely to what His nature is. You may distinguish the varied glories we have been considering, but you cannot dislocate them from the Person of the Lord, as He now is, as God’s testimony to the efficacy of Atonement.
Scripture says “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever.” Yesterday refers to what is past, namely, the glory which He had with the Father before the world was, before He created anything, also the glory of His humiliation in His lowly walk down here, where He revealed the Father, and the moral glory of the cross, where God was revealed in His full estimate of good and evil. “To-day” refers to what “we all behold with unveiled face,” that is, 2 Corinthians 3:10-11,18; 4:4,6 — “the glory that excelleth,” and “which remaineth.” “For ever,” tells us that this glory will never, never grow dim.
How could it ever diminish, seeing that He is in the just result of the work He had undertaken to accomplish before incarnation, of the work He was on His way to perform during the time the corn of wheat was abiding alone, and of which He said before He left the cross, “It is finished.” Hence we read in Acts 2:36, of the testimony which God has given to its efficacy in making Him both Lord and Christ in glory.
Also in 2 Corinthians 3 and 4, we get the proof that all our sins are gone as we gaze with unveiled face at the glory of the Lord (3:18), where we get the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ shining (4:4), and the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (4:6). Thus we behold Him as Lord over all, from death and hades to the throne of God (3:18), as made Christ, the anointed Man — not His personal name, but His name as come for others (4:4), and as God’s unveiled redemption glory seen in His blessed face (4:6).
Such exhibitions of Jesus, as He now is, create an answer to, and make the poor vessel resemble the Object of its delights. It is thus we are changed into the same image from moral glory to moral glory, our state being formed by the revelation of that into which Christ has entered. The subjective character of the life we live is by faith in its own Object, and depends upon the source from which it flows, as the Holy Ghost glorifies Jesus in becoming the link between the little vessel and the Reservoir; for it is not by faith, but by the Holy Ghost, that we are united to Him, and “changed into the same image by the Spirit of the Lord.” He said “Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth .... And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they might be sanctified through the truth.”
Now there is no truth in man naturally, therefore you cannot separate the revelation of the Object from the inwrought state which this object produces. There can be no separation of the truth in the heart from the truth which sanctifies, this truth being the glory in a totally new position and state of life, seen by the testimony of the Holy Ghost in Christ as He now is.
I remember Him where He was for God, in all His obedient lowly humility, and patient grace, and I say that is my life for the place where He is no longer. I look at Him where He is for me — the expression of God’s consistency with His sufferings and atonement for my sins, and I see Him thus as my righteousness. There is first the Object, and then there is an answer in the conscience and heart to this “glory which excelleth.” Thus the living manifestation, as seen in Christ, and the state formed by the Holy Ghost’s activity in me, in testifying to Christ, are co-ordinate, because the fact in Christ produces its own moral character in the beholder; for the communication is the truth, which changes into the image of that which it communicates, glory being the proof that everything which could give us a quiver of conscience is gone, because it is our sin-Bearer who is there.
In Colinthians 3:11 we read: “Christ is all and in all,” that is, “all,” objectively, and “in all,” subjectively, as living power — a produced state by the enjoyment of what He is now for us in the glory. We become animated with the peaceful sense of what He is for God and for us. Another has said: “Christ is all, not by the life of Christ in us being all, which is a more subtle self, by delighting in having done with self, not Christ taking the place of self.” But when we take Christ instead of self, what a permanent link is formed between the new man and Christ as He now is beyond death, and so on, with whom we get filled, by beholding His redemption glory, as the Purger of our sins.
“Oh love supreme and bright,
Good to the feeblest heart,
That gives us now, as heavenly light,
What soon shall be our part.
We have, however, to be mindful of the divine principle which we learn in the Book of Job, that it was all wrong for Job to say of himself what God could say of him. The instant he did so, it was self, not God. It is good for us to understand this principle, for it is God’s way for our enjoying our relationship of need to that which meets it in Another.
I know His bounties, His beauties, His graces, by the manner in which they meet all my selfish deformities and unbelief; and in loving these graces in Christ, by the way He meets my want of them, I get delivered from self and all its mystical vagaries, so as to love goodness in Him instead of in me, although I always remain the conscious “I” — consciously enjoying what He is to me, but an “I” that has all its pleasure in Him, so that I delight in taking Christ instead of me, that is, the Christian does so. Christ, perfect as He Was, and because He was so as Man, always took God instead of Himself; but we cannot take Christ instead of ourselves, save by dying daily to an evil nature, which of course He had not to do, for although He entered into our circumstances, yet He never was in our state. But He died to sin, when made it — our sin: and now we have the privilege to recognize this fact by always “bearing about in our” body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also “of Jesus might be made manifest in our body.”
We will now look at the “mystery of godliness,” the pith of which, with other valuable leaflets, have been culled from Collected Writings, by dear Wm. Fryer of Bristol.
“Without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory” (1 Tim. 3:16).
Here we get two totally distinct things:
First, the “mystery of piety” — “eusebiea,” a word which could not possibly be applied to the Godhead. I am not denying that the Godhead is a mystery, and never will cease to be; for the finite can never understand the infinite, and He would not be God whom the creature could fathom. But this word “godliness,” expresses our subjective state. It is found again in chapter 4:7-8, and is translated “holiness” in Acts 3:12.
Secondly, we get the whole course of the Son of God, from the glory He had with the Father, before He created a world, down to the cross and hades, and back again to the Father’s throne, as Man, the Accomplisher of eternal redemption. This is the objective truth, which produces the subjective state, by the activity of the Holy Ghost, and is called godliness: it is the condition produced; for in every case of a moral creature, the objective truth, not only forms, but imprints its character on, that which it produces. Thus, the believer has an answer produced in him to the character in which God reveals Himself, which is the measure of what true holiness is; so that the development of the affections for Christ is affected by the Object of them, because their springs and resources being in Christ Himself, who is now become “the excellent glory,” are above and beyond the power of their own satisfaction, the power of their own devotion, and still will be beyond the power of their own glory in the future state.
But, even now, the Object of faith is the power of life — a power which always sustains that which it produces. The Lord said: “As the living Father sent me, and I live on account of the Father, so he that eateth me, even he shall live on account of me.” This is more an assertion of the certainty of life, than an expression of dependence, whether in His own case, or ours. Wonderful grace ! How amply sufficient for us, whilst His “strength is made perfect in weakness”!
The divine nature in us is always as dependent as Christ was, when in this scene; it cannot live on itself; it must have an object above, beyond, and wholly outside of oneself, for its springs; and this blessed Object, perfect in Himself, becomes the activity of His own graces in the believer, in the very place from which He has been personally cast out.
In the natural life there are two involuntary actions always going on, whether one is sleeping or waking; and they are sustained by the Creator, not by the creature. One is the supply, through the lungs, of that which is necessary to sustain life; the other, is the beating of the heart, which animates the natural man. So, also, is it in reference to the spiritual man, in whom life and love — Divine products, always have to be sustained by God, the creature being insufficient for this. And as holiness is the development of these, how we welcome the Lord’s words, “without me ye can do nothing.”
But there is also another mystery referred to in this same chapter (I Tim., 3:6-7). We are there warned against “the crime,” and “the snare,” or the traps of the devil, two very different things. In the former we get a reference made to Ezekiel 28:12-19, where, under the figure of the King of Tyrus, Satan’s fall is thus described. “Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty: thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness.” We thus learn that he made his own beauty and his own brightness his object, instead of God, who had created these beauteous qualities; and the apostle warns us against a similar practice, which he calls in 2 Thessalonians 2:7, “the mystery of iniquity,” telling us, it is already working, and will not cease to work until Anti-Christ is manifested, when it will cease to be a mystery any longer, but not until then.
Open sin is no mystery. But “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light” in order to imitate God’s goodness, and thus make it appear as if he were in the same interest as Christ and His saints. This is not open sin.
Man had a standard of his own, for good and evil, until Christ came into the world. But now the only true standard of the saint for good and evil, is to rise above the evil, as God Himself is above it, seeing that Christianity is founded on the complete setting aside of self, in its most attenuated form; because the “Last Adam,” having exposed all its false efforts for amelioration, is before God, in “the glory that excelleth,” as much the representative of His redeemed there, as He was their substitute, when bearing their sins on the cross. Satan’s object is to frustrate this, by introducing the creature’s beauty and brightness as an object for him, which really was his own condemnation, or crime; in fact, by introducing something in the way of holiness for self, so as to cheat us out of having Christ instead of self.
This is the mystery which we are warned against, and which is going on simultaneously with the mystery of piety. The former is really mysticism; but the latter is no mystery to the initiated: it is the truth of God as to His redemption — His highest glory, now unveiled, in the face of Jesus Christ.
There is another of these ways of God-a wonderful thing, indeed, which I shall refer to before closing. The prophetic language of Psalm 16 gives us words suited to express the Lord’s experience in the place He had taken, and which was historically fulfilled when He identified Himself with the faithful remnant, on their turning away from the temple to the voice of the prophet (really the voice of God), in the desert, and confessing their sins, thus carrying out the principle inculcated by the Lord Himself, in the following words: “But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.” It was at that time that Jesus identified Himself with those faithful few, saying to them, as it were, you are taking an obedient path, and I must go with you.
The language of three first verses of this Psalm comes in here, which I give according to the New Translation: “Preserve me O God: for in Thee do I put my trust. O my soul thou hast said unto Jehovah, Thou art my God: my goodness extendeth not to thee. But to the saints (Thou hast said) who are on the earth, to the excellent: In them is all my delight.” Again, in Mark 10:11 we read the following words of the Lord Jesus to one who kneeled to Him: “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is God.” When we put those two Scriptures together with John 1:1,14,18, we get divine teachings as to the Eternal Son of God come down into a place and state so lowly as to be able to use such language as this, which is the expression of the true experience of His soul when occupying the place into which He had entered, voluntarily on His part, and in grace and love to us.
In the first of the Scriptures we find that the moral glory of the perfect Man is to have goodness extending from God to Him, instead of from Him to God: “My goodness extendeth not to thee.” So Jesus, although never at any time less than God Himself, yet having become a Man, does not use His Godhead power to falsify His position as a Man perfectly dependent upon God for everything, goodness included; for it is thus that His perfection is manifested in the place He had taken. Dependence being the essence of perfection in a Man, He keeps Himself in this place, loving to be perfectly dependent upon His Father, and answers to such Scriptures as: “The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: he wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learner. The Lord God hath opened mine ear, and I was not rebellious, neither turned away back. I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair; I hid not my face from shame and spitting” (Isaiah 50:4-6).
Another has said, the only time the Lord took the initiative was in becoming a Man, “Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared me Then said I, Lo I come (in the volume of the book it is written of me), to do thy will, O God.” From the moment He took the prepared body, obedience characterized Him, all the way, from the manger to, and through, the cross.
When we contemplate the Lord in the lowly place He had taken, there is a danger of the mind working, and of the natural reason taking the place of conscience and heart, for if mind takes the place of conscience God is left out. To protect us from this, the Lord tells us “no man knoweth the Son but the Father.” And He lets us know that He is what no man can know in the depths of His Person. If a finite creature could fathom the union of God and Man in One Person, He would not be God whom we could thus know; but we can, arid do know, the Father in the Son, who is the image of the invisible God, and reveals the Father to us. His divinity is guarded in His lowliness by the incomprehensibility of His Person to finite reason; but when the conscience is awake to the fact that it was our sin and misery brought Him there, then we are drawn by goodness such as that, to love it — not to love goodness in oneself, but to love it in His heart who has drawn us, and saved us.
In Mark 10:18, He speaks of goodness as abstract and absolute, of which God alone is the source. It is perfection in a man not to have absolute springs of goodness in himself, as if man were independent of God, and always to be exhibiting flowing streams of goodness as dependent upon God for those streams. But Jesus was more than a man at all times, and there-fore, He had absolute springs of goodness in Himself as God; and this is what makes His lowly words so wonderful in His taken place as Man: “I can of mine own self do nothing” (John v, 3o.) There is none that doeth good independently of God, because goodness in man never ceases to be derivative from God.
Witness the elect angels: it is because they are elect that they have divine security for permanent goodness, as holy angels; for no creature can stand unsustained. Ought men to be less suited to God’s tastes than angels in their respective places of dependence? It must not be. Therefore, God never arranges truth so as to feed the vain thoughts of man, but to expose him to himself, in the folly of his loving goodness in himself, instead of always having it derivatively, by loving it in Another, where it is always perfect.
Man can never be suited to the eye and approval of God by loving goodness in himself, because there is no power to subdue self in this way. If you are trying to be what you would like to be, you will never succeed; but if, in your estimate of Another, Christ is what you would like Him to be, then He says of you, and of all such, to the Father: “I have given them thy words, and they have received them.” It is by His given words you become dependent, and unceasingly derivative goodness is always your portion, as long as Christ is what you would like Him to be, just because you are delighting in that.
This is the opposite to mysticism: it is the truth — the very contrast to the mystic vanities, which, alas, are often active in a saint, but which God exposes by the contrast in Christ’s lowliness, who became so dependent as to he able to use the following language, suited to express His feelings in His taken place: “I can of mine own self do nothing”; “If I witness of myself my witness is not true”; “My goodness extendeth not to thee” “Why callest thou me good; there is none good but one, that is God”; “Not what I will, but what thou wilt”; “I will put my trust in him”; “My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me”; “He that speaketh of himself, seeketh his own glory; but he that seeketh his glory that sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him”; “I seek not mine own glory”; “As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me.”
Oh, how such language marks the infinitely wonderful grace of “the Word become flesh,” and who thus introduced into Manhood as perfect a holiness as was His before He became a Man at all, in order (as Man) always to take God instead of Himself, as the foregoing Scriptures declare, “leaving us an example that we should follow in his steps.” What a wonderful privilege it is for us, now that His grace has set us in the same place as Himself, to take Him for our example in all things, except, of course, the awful sin-atoning agony, and its connections.
Only, in our case, one has to take Christ instead of oneself practically (as I have already referred to, 2 Cor. 4:10), by bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, by which means Christ then comes out, instead of self.
We thus display goodness which is unceasingly derivative, whilst we live at Gilgal, the place of circumcision, across Jordan, where everything in oneself, which could create a ruffle in the conscience, was put away for God, and for faith, by the necessary agony of the Lord, and His death, which alone could have put it away from God’s sight, by judgment executed on Jesus, when He stood in our place.
It is thus that self is gone, as an object, by being superseded with Christ, so that all our goodness might be a risen Christ in a derivative way, and always replenished by occupation with “the glory that excelleth,” which gives us the sense of the value, to God, of His dying, and keeps our faith unfeigned, and our perfected consciences pure, so as to be always rejoicing in Him for “the help of His countenance,” which thus becomes “the health of ours,” taking care never to make the latter our object, but the former.
Suppose that faith, hope, and love intertwine themselves with one another, apart from their true Object, as prop for support, and source for replenishment, they cease to be genuine; and mysticism is the immediate consequence of not having Christ, instead of oneself, as our portion before God, in the light. But when we all with unveiled face behold “the glory that excelleth,” and “which remaineth,” we are metamorphosed, or made to resemble the Object which God has given for our affections instead of oneself.
In fact, when anything but Christ, no matter what, becomes an object, even for oneself, it is a sure sign that Christ Himself has not His place in our hearts, instead of oneself; and thus saints get enveloped in clouds of mystical piety, instead of being in the enjoyment of what the truth reveals.
The glory, that excelleth, 2 Cor. 3:10,18.
Is Jesus now on high;
This glory which remaineth 2 Cor. 3:11,18.
Denotes our place so nigh —
For our acceptance, in that place,
Displays the glory of His grace. Eph. 1:6.
That which is due to Jesus,
Whose suffering measures sin,
Now marks what fully frees us
From that which we were in.
Th’ Eternal Son gave up His throne,
That for our guilt He might atone.
The sin, the wrath, the glory,
Have each their own fit place;
God’s truth tells out the story
For us, in deepest grace.
No compromise of judgment there,
To mitigate the wrath Christ bare.
When distant, lost, and hating
The love seen in His face,
For such He died, Who’s living,
To have us in his place —
Result of His own death which tells
Of grace, and “glory that excels.” 2 Cor. 3:10.
’Tis in redeeming goodness —
Goodness beyond all thought —
We know Him in His fullness,
For thus it is we’re brought
To God Himself, in perfect grace,
Revealed to us in Jesus’ face.
Our goodness comes from loving
Goodness that saves the lost,
Beyond all future giving,
Because at such a cost.
Nothing can e’er come up this,
Not e’en the gift of heavenly bliss.
Such goodness, loved in Jesus,
Protects us from the snare
Of loving goodness in us,
Since we have got it there,
To reproduce without alloy
This goodness which we now enjoy.
O, Blessed Master, keep us
Faithful and true to Thee,
Until we see Thy glory,
And be for ever free
From loving goodness anywhere
Save in the love that brought us there.
APPENDIX A
Extracted from a letter dated October 8th, 1886.
I count upon your love in allowing me to expose the difference between us; but first let me say, I in no wise deny that subjective truth has its place, which Scripture teaches, as I quoted on the occasion you refer to, from Rom. 5:5, and 1 John, 4:12, which are respectively followed by Scriptures which mark the subjective state by its object. On the importance of subjective truth we have no difference whatever; and so far from denying it, I stated at that the condition of truth in us is inseparable from the objective revelation which produces it, and that the inwrought state, that is, the subjective, must not be separated from the truth which sanctifies. “For their sakes I sanctify myself” (object), “that they also might be sanctified through the truth” (subjective). This is what I maintained at —, and I still refuse the smallest approach to attenuated perfection elsewhere than in Christ The only subjective perfection I know of is a perfected conscience, which from its very perfection charges me with folly directly I myself see anything in myself but sin and need. In fact my relationship to Another is one of unceasing need; it is a relationship to that which supplies my need in Another; and this forms the link between me and the qualities of that nature which I am now indebted to for all that I have not got, or am deficient of, therefore it is in Another that I love those qualities, not in myself, for this reason, that they meet my not having them; and in thus delighting in the goodness which meets my not having any, what I delight in is appropriated just because I delight in it, and self is thus morally set aside.
Every Christian likes to think of goodness, of course, and loves it, but the instant he loves it in himself, it is all selfishness. God sets Christ before him as an Object, to love goodness so as to love it in Him, who has sanctified (or separated) Himself as the glorified Man, the Purger of our sins, in order that a poor thing, like you and me, should have perfection in what Christ is to us. This is a wonderful perfection, a perfect rest in what is perfect: it is the most absolute contradiction to the smallest approach to perfection elsewhere than in the Object, which presents God’s unveiled glory to faith. It is a perfection so indebted to objective truth, that the moment complacency of faith is removed from its own Object to the subjective condition, the perfection of the latter is shattered to its foundation. And enjoyment being in the Object, the conscious “I” always remains in its own individuality and personality for eternity, but it is an I that never has the “I” for its object, but Christ, in whom its satisfaction, its rest, and its delight abide.
In the glory we shall never have to think of ourselves, no, not even when we shall be worth looking at. It is only when we are not worth looking at that we sometimes love goodness in ourselves, at which instant all our goodness becomes badness. This is where I join issue with some of my dear brethren, and you, my dear brother, for sure I am from the views you put forth, that you never could scripturally and successfully overthrow the arguments of the doctrine of perfection elsewhere than in Christ, much less those of a well-trained _____ite.
Allow me to turn to Job for a moment. Did not God say he was a perfect and an upright man, that there was none like him in all the earth? Was not the perfection which God spoke of that which God Himself had produced in Job? But when the devil had succeeded in getting Job to say this of himself, where was his perfection then? Gone! because self-occupation had taken its place.
How solemn, I again say, that the apostle should have to bring Satan’s condemnation before us in 1Tim. 3, which the Spirit of God speaks of in Ezekiel 28:17. Is this treated lightly by us?
Now take the Scriptures you quoted at——, and again in your loving gracious letter to me: “We know that we have passed from death unto life because we love the brethren.” Now I am not at all denying the practical righteousness — love to the brethren, in the midst of a world of selfishness and sin — is a proof that we are born of God. But this leads me to God instantly, as in the following sixteenth verse — “Hereby perceive we love, because he laid down his life for us.” Where do we perceive it? We perceive it in the objective truth, which takes us away from the possibility of any subjective complacency. You tell me that these “traits in us... are referred to as tests to us.” Very well; supposing me to be a man of spiritual integrity, do I reduce the tests to my defects, or judge my defects by the tests? If the latter, I ask myself, do I love the brethren as much as Christ does?
Dare I say so? And, on the other hand, were I to take complacency in any love of mine to others, which is not as perfect as that of Christ’s, what self-sufficiency it would be ! Oh, what a retreat is his bosom, from self, in its most attenuated form! Is His heart objective or subjective truth? Very well, look at the Object, lay close to His bosom, and then that will form the spring and fountain of yours. But if you get occupied with the streams, that is, the subjective, you cease to draw from the springs, that is, the Object, and that instant the stream gets awfully muddy.
Again, you quote as test, and I agree with you:
“And hereby we know that we know him, if we keep his commandments.”
But do I say I keep His commandments, in loving others as He loves me? Were I to say so, I should be a Pharisee, and were I to make doing this an object for my own heart, that instant all its beauties are gone. Christ alone is the Object, and the Spring, of love. Take complacency in any other object (that is, for power of walk), and the subjective beauties change to self; because the pure streams for practical godliness cease to flow from the pure Spring
One word more as to that which you refer to “on previous occasions,” namely, Galatians 1:16 and Colossians 3:11. I know on one of these occasions the truth was contradicted by elder brethren, which, I fear, did much damage to saints, yourself amongst the number. With reference to this I said, “Christ in me,” (Gal. 1:16) is subjective truth, and inseparable from “the revelation of Jesus Christ to me” (verse 12), the Object of faith, which becomes the power of life, the intervening verses, 13 and 14, forming a kind of parenthesis.
That which the apostle possessed, as described in verse 16, was given by the immediate revelation of Christ, referred to in verse 12, and Acts 9:3; 26:13. This I hold, and hope to hold, until I get to heaven, where I shall hold it still, and others, who refuse it here, will hold it there; for in every case of a creature, it will always remain true that, what is objective, is the source of the subjective state.
Now take Colossians 3:11 — “Christ is all, and in all.” Here we again get objective and subjective truth, that is, “Christ is all,” objectively, and “in all,” subjectively, as living power in which He is enjoyed — but enjoyed as personally in the glory, “Christ is all.” Observe, it does not say: “the life of Christ in us is all”; but this life in us is unfolded in connection with its Object, because the character of life in its manifestation depends upon its own object, the Object being the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, who is in the glory as the Purger of our sins, because our sins are gone.
See 2 Corinthians3:18; 4:4,6, and then verse 7 gives the “treasure in earthen vessels.”
I am sure this is the character of truth which exposes the contrary doctrine. And it overthrows the American heresy also; for “eternal life” is characterized by its own object, which is no partial revelation of God, as in the Old Testament times, but the Father revealed in the Son.
APPENDIX B
Holiness never commences until righteousness is a settled thing for the soul, by deliverance being known, and this gives the highest standard of right and wrong for holiness. But the state of a delivered saint is so distinct from his previous condition, even when converted, that one cannot possibly be in both states at the same time. There may be holy desires, but for the affections to be fully holy, God must be fully known in grace. And even then an Object is needed for growth, because no moral creature can live without God, not only to sustain life, but for Object, save in a degraded, debased condition, with self as an object and craving center of its own lusts. This, I repeat, does not only refer to a life that is, and must be, sustained by God, but also to the necessity of having God Himself as Object for dependence and for the affections. Even a beast lives, being sustained by God, although it is not a moral creature, with a capacity for conscious dependence upon Him. But man was created with this capacity, and gave up God for a lie of the devil 3 and then he became his own object and center, instead of having God as such. This was the occasion for bringing out all that God is in goodness in redemption, so that He Himself, as thus revealed, should be the Object for recovered man, who never was, and never can be, sufficient for his own affections and happiness. God alone is self-sufficing; no creature, however exalted, ever can be so.
And yet it is amazing how this lie of the devil is again at work, to substitute an imaginary pious self for Christ, as an Object, and this even among saints, who have been put into possession of the highest heavenly truths, knowing the Father revealed in the Son, which, Scripture says, is eternal life, but which, as possessed by, and as in a babe as well as a father, is never self-sustaining, nor self-sufficing and independent of its own Object and Source, even Christ Him-self, who has entered into a condition which shows eternal life beyond death and its power, in His own Person as Object and Source, for this life in us. The appended extract touches on this subject:
“We have the fullest element of satisfying glory for ourselves, the prize of our calling above, the resurrection from among the dead; yet all selfishness is taken out of it. What clothed self with honor is, as we have seen, all loss. It helped to set up the old man. The Christian’s object is Christ, which implies getting rid of the first altogether. It exalts man, but not self. When modern infidelity would exalt man, it simply exalts self. Christianity exalts man, even to divine glory and divine excellency, but it sets aside self wholly. ‘What was gain to me,’ says the apostle, ‘I counted loss for Christ.’ Learning is gain for self. To be English, French, and so forth, to have mine own righteousness as a reputation in the world, or a title with God, is self. I am what others are not. The world wants these motives — of course it does; it has no other. Energy is produced by them, but there is no moral advance. Self remains the spring, the center, of human activity. We are told:
Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake,
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake.
A larger circle may be produced round self, but self remains the center still. Master, that thou shouldest give us to sit, one on thy right hand and another on thy left hand, in thy kingdom.’ This was self — a good place which others would not have. None of this is found here: ‘That I may win Christ is the highest blessing, the blessedest affections, but all transferring the heart from self to Christ.
“But see further — It transferred the affections to what in itself was supremely excellent, to an object which was the adequate object of delight to God the Father. God has given us to delight in what He finds His sufficient object of delight in too. What a tale this tells of our true reconciliation to God! Not merely judicial reconciliation to God, which was needed, but the elevation of our moral nature to the measure of divine delights and fellowship with Him; though, of course, ever recipient, and glad to be so from love, He ever the divine Giver; but in Christ, the one object of delight. In the creature though there may be a suited nature, as evidently there must, yet the moral state of the soul is formed and characterized by its objects. But this not in rest. That will be our heavenly state. We are living in a world by which Satan seeks to seduce us by acting on the old man.” — Collected Writings, Vol. 17, page 528.
H. H. McCarthy