The Fuller Meaning Of The Cross
[Certain extracts from a message of T Austin Sparks on the Cross]
The Cross (or its type - the Altar) was ever God's new starting-point in the realization of His full thought...Calvary is not an end in itself, but the beginning of everything...The great values of the Lamb slain, as related to the first stage or phase of Christian experience, [i.e.] deliverance from the judgment resting upon the world; deliverance from condemnation and death; deliverance from the tyranny or the bondage of an evil conscience - all in virtue of the righteousness which is by faith in that Righteous One who offered Himself without spot to God for us...What Christ by His Cross was and is for us was our anchor-ground...
Yes, the objective meaning of Calvary - Christ crucified - is of unspeakable importance in the matter of a believer's standing...But, when we have taken account of this and have it well settled, it may only relate to deliverance from "Egypt". It was a mighty thing that happened in Egypt, in virtue of the slain Lamb and shed and sprinkled blood...While an outward bondage was destroyed, there still remained an inward bondage. Israel in the wilderness represents the dominion of the natural life, the self-life, the "flesh"...This wilderness life represented much expenditure of energy, much laborious effort, much longing and aspiration, much service and much religious devotion and activity, but it never got through, and it was one big circle, coming back, in effect, to where they were before...
We really only come into the good of things by being "pressed out of measure"...Thus it was that we were turned in [a] dark hour to Romans chapter six, and, almost as though He spoke in audible language, the Lord said: ‘When I died, you died. When I went to the Cross I not only took your sins, but I took you. When I took you, I not only took you as the sinner that you might regard yourself to be, but I took you as being all that you are by nature; your good (?) as your bad; your abilities as well as your disabilities; yes, every resource of yours. I took you as a "worker", a "preacher", an "organizer"! My Cross means that not even for Me can you be or do anything out from yourself, but if there is to be anything at all it must be out from Me, and that means a life of absolute dependence and faith.’
At this point, therefore, we awoke to the fundamental principle of our Lord's own life..."nothing of (out from) Himself", but "all things of (out from) God"...This is the whole meaning of life in the Spirit, and that it is an altogether different life from the natural ways of men, even of Christian men...While an end is written large in the Cross, and while that end is to be accepted as our end indeed, so that there can be no more of anything so far as we are concerned, Jesus Lives! and that means boundless possibilities...
Thus we came to see that the Red Sea and the Jordan are but two sides to the one Cross. Both symbolize the spiritual death and resurrection of the believer, but the latter carries it into another realm. Jordan sees the deliverance from judgment, death, and doom, carried on to deliverance from self; it is the practical disconnection of what is dead from what is risen. In the first it is my sins; in the second it is my self. At the crossing of the Jordan a monument of twelve stones, a type of the Israelites themselves, was left buried in the bed of the river, as if to signify that the self-life of the wilderness was to be henceforth reckoned as judged and ended as absolutely as was the bondage to Pharaoh. And then another memorial of twelve stones was taken from the bed of the river and placed on the Canaan shore, as a type of themselves, as risen not only to newness of life, but also to a perpetual and practical separation from their dead and buried selves. All this is as by union with Christ crucified and risen...
Israel after the flesh in the wilderness, and Israel after the Spirit in Canaan, while both having known the blessing of salvation from judgment, are like two different peoples. So it was with us. The difference is unspeakably great...There is one phrase that puts so much of it all into expression - ‘an open heaven'. How the life of nature blocks the way to the life of the Spirit! How doing, or attempting to do, work for God in our own natural energy closes the way to the energies of the Spirit! How our mental strivings and intellectual labours to apprehend spiritual truth lock the door to illumination by the Spirit!
There is a double tragedy that may be associated with this subjective or experimental meaning of the Cross. On the one side, there is the tragedy of the ignorance of so many of the Lord's people, leading to or resulting in a wilderness history in life and service. A tremendous amount of energy, expenditure, effort, and strain, with spiritual results so incommensurate. The wilderness is ever a bounded place; limited by the horizons of sense; never characterized by the realization of the limitless fulnesses of the heavenly emancipation from nature.
If the "natural" man (not the unregenerate man, necessarily) still exerts an influence in the realm of Divine things, there is bound to ensue a static system of teaching, a fixed horizon of vision, a legal bondage to tradition, a fear of man, a deadening domination of the "letter" as separated from the "spirit", and many other unhappy situations of spiritual death, endless divisions, and spiritual pride. Paul's remedy for traditionalism and legalism in relation to Christians, was Christ Crucified, as see ‘Romans’ and ‘Galatians’. The same remedy was resorted to for all the painful fruits of carnality amongst believers, as see ‘Corinthians’...
Israel in Canaan did not represent introspective self-occupation and morbid engagement with how much more they personally had to be crucified. They were free, and free to do the Lord's business. The 'Jordan' meaning of the Cross, carrying, as it does, the ‘Red Sea’ aspect into the realm of self-life, means freedom from self...
The crisis is like the touch upon the sinew of Jacob's thigh. The strength of nature is definitely and permanently crippled, so that "Jacob" will carry that veto to his last day, when he will still be "leaning upon the top of his staff". The progressive outworking will be in the discovery of how much there is that we cannot do - are not allowed to do - of ourselves, because of that basic forbidding of the Cross.We have said that this 'Jordan' experience of the Cross is a crisis - and what a crisis it is! It is not only the end of one realm, it is the opening up of and entering upon a new one. So it proved to be with us, as with Israel. Through this experience we entered into a great expanse of spiritual life, light, and liberty.
From Explanation of the Nature and History of "This Ministry" by T Austin Sparks
The Cross (or its type - the Altar) was ever God's new starting-point in the realization of His full thought...Calvary is not an end in itself, but the beginning of everything...The great values of the Lamb slain, as related to the first stage or phase of Christian experience, [i.e.] deliverance from the judgment resting upon the world; deliverance from condemnation and death; deliverance from the tyranny or the bondage of an evil conscience - all in virtue of the righteousness which is by faith in that Righteous One who offered Himself without spot to God for us...What Christ by His Cross was and is for us was our anchor-ground...
Yes, the objective meaning of Calvary - Christ crucified - is of unspeakable importance in the matter of a believer's standing...But, when we have taken account of this and have it well settled, it may only relate to deliverance from "Egypt". It was a mighty thing that happened in Egypt, in virtue of the slain Lamb and shed and sprinkled blood...While an outward bondage was destroyed, there still remained an inward bondage. Israel in the wilderness represents the dominion of the natural life, the self-life, the "flesh"...This wilderness life represented much expenditure of energy, much laborious effort, much longing and aspiration, much service and much religious devotion and activity, but it never got through, and it was one big circle, coming back, in effect, to where they were before...
We really only come into the good of things by being "pressed out of measure"...Thus it was that we were turned in [a] dark hour to Romans chapter six, and, almost as though He spoke in audible language, the Lord said: ‘When I died, you died. When I went to the Cross I not only took your sins, but I took you. When I took you, I not only took you as the sinner that you might regard yourself to be, but I took you as being all that you are by nature; your good (?) as your bad; your abilities as well as your disabilities; yes, every resource of yours. I took you as a "worker", a "preacher", an "organizer"! My Cross means that not even for Me can you be or do anything out from yourself, but if there is to be anything at all it must be out from Me, and that means a life of absolute dependence and faith.’
At this point, therefore, we awoke to the fundamental principle of our Lord's own life..."nothing of (out from) Himself", but "all things of (out from) God"...This is the whole meaning of life in the Spirit, and that it is an altogether different life from the natural ways of men, even of Christian men...While an end is written large in the Cross, and while that end is to be accepted as our end indeed, so that there can be no more of anything so far as we are concerned, Jesus Lives! and that means boundless possibilities...
Thus we came to see that the Red Sea and the Jordan are but two sides to the one Cross. Both symbolize the spiritual death and resurrection of the believer, but the latter carries it into another realm. Jordan sees the deliverance from judgment, death, and doom, carried on to deliverance from self; it is the practical disconnection of what is dead from what is risen. In the first it is my sins; in the second it is my self. At the crossing of the Jordan a monument of twelve stones, a type of the Israelites themselves, was left buried in the bed of the river, as if to signify that the self-life of the wilderness was to be henceforth reckoned as judged and ended as absolutely as was the bondage to Pharaoh. And then another memorial of twelve stones was taken from the bed of the river and placed on the Canaan shore, as a type of themselves, as risen not only to newness of life, but also to a perpetual and practical separation from their dead and buried selves. All this is as by union with Christ crucified and risen...
Israel after the flesh in the wilderness, and Israel after the Spirit in Canaan, while both having known the blessing of salvation from judgment, are like two different peoples. So it was with us. The difference is unspeakably great...There is one phrase that puts so much of it all into expression - ‘an open heaven'. How the life of nature blocks the way to the life of the Spirit! How doing, or attempting to do, work for God in our own natural energy closes the way to the energies of the Spirit! How our mental strivings and intellectual labours to apprehend spiritual truth lock the door to illumination by the Spirit!
There is a double tragedy that may be associated with this subjective or experimental meaning of the Cross. On the one side, there is the tragedy of the ignorance of so many of the Lord's people, leading to or resulting in a wilderness history in life and service. A tremendous amount of energy, expenditure, effort, and strain, with spiritual results so incommensurate. The wilderness is ever a bounded place; limited by the horizons of sense; never characterized by the realization of the limitless fulnesses of the heavenly emancipation from nature.
If the "natural" man (not the unregenerate man, necessarily) still exerts an influence in the realm of Divine things, there is bound to ensue a static system of teaching, a fixed horizon of vision, a legal bondage to tradition, a fear of man, a deadening domination of the "letter" as separated from the "spirit", and many other unhappy situations of spiritual death, endless divisions, and spiritual pride. Paul's remedy for traditionalism and legalism in relation to Christians, was Christ Crucified, as see ‘Romans’ and ‘Galatians’. The same remedy was resorted to for all the painful fruits of carnality amongst believers, as see ‘Corinthians’...
Israel in Canaan did not represent introspective self-occupation and morbid engagement with how much more they personally had to be crucified. They were free, and free to do the Lord's business. The 'Jordan' meaning of the Cross, carrying, as it does, the ‘Red Sea’ aspect into the realm of self-life, means freedom from self...
The crisis is like the touch upon the sinew of Jacob's thigh. The strength of nature is definitely and permanently crippled, so that "Jacob" will carry that veto to his last day, when he will still be "leaning upon the top of his staff". The progressive outworking will be in the discovery of how much there is that we cannot do - are not allowed to do - of ourselves, because of that basic forbidding of the Cross.We have said that this 'Jordan' experience of the Cross is a crisis - and what a crisis it is! It is not only the end of one realm, it is the opening up of and entering upon a new one. So it proved to be with us, as with Israel. Through this experience we entered into a great expanse of spiritual life, light, and liberty.
From Explanation of the Nature and History of "This Ministry" by T Austin Sparks
posted by prolix at 11:13 PM
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