"The Rights of God" # 18

Prophetic Service (continued)

When the Lord shows us such things, a crisis emerges for us. Are we prepared to pay the price? Are we prepared to be called enemies, who apparently want to confuse the people of God? Are we prepared to take a place of full trusting and dependence, if only God attains His goal? We may be slandered and regarded as contemptuous, but what does it matter? As long as God is honored!

I think we all realize such decisions are final and definitive. The decision that God demands of us takes everything away from us. But how abundant in contrast to this is what God gives us! We have the choice. We can decide for God with the full consciousness as to what we have decided. The alternative is to reject our calling. We can return to lower, earthly things because of all sorts of reasons. We then lose the vision, and we lose the calling. We have missed "so great a salvation" (Hebrews 2:3).

Elijah's behavior is also meaningful in reference to something else. In his time Israel was divided. He could have accepted the division without complaining about it, wishing for a better time. But he does not accept the separations. He builds an altar of twelve stones, to bring to expression that according to God's thought the church is an indivisible whole. From God's point of view she is one body. Did the Lord not say to Jacob: "Thy name shall be Israel"? (Genesis 32:28). As a prince of God he was called to build the house of God. Elijah refuses to present anything to a part of Israel that may only be applied to the whole.

Please read: 1 Kings 18:31-39)

Do we not see the same in the Letter to the Ephesians? Paul sees the church, as  far as an earthly representation is concerned, in the process of collapsing. As he looked at his life work from prison in Rome, he had to admit that it did not last. In Asia, in Galatia, in Europe, everywhere he sees failure and breakdown. When he was free he could travel to and fro; he could do his utmost to keep the spiritual state of things going. Now, sitting in prison, he watched the work come to nothing. Some assemblies turned away from him altogether. The  state of the church could have caused him to say: It is all in vain. However, in reading the Letter to the Ephesians, we do not find the slightest indication of such a point of view. He wrote the letter at the end of his life. Had he written the letter at the beginning, we would say: What a wonderful ideal the church of Paul is. However, Paul wrote it when the church on earth was failing. Despite this, for Paul there is no division. Oneness is the word that governs this letter. What kept Paul from despair was this:

"Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God; and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone; in Whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: in Whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit" (Ephesians 2:19-22).

Paul saw the heavenly reality of the church in Christ. He saw the Body of Jesus Christ in its perfection through the work of Christ. He saw that the Lord did not want to make something for the earth, but that through the Holy Spirit He was seeking to turn from the earthly into the heavenly that which had been redeemed from the earth in Him.

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 19)