Faith Unto Enlargement Through Adversity # 14

The Key of Faith (continued)

Emptiness The Result of Judgment

Returning to that word "void" or "empty" that we find at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, it seems to me that this represents the result of a judgment. That, of course, has already been surmised on other grounds. But the following considerations are perhaps confirmatory. When the Lord sent His people Israel into Babylonian captivity for seventy years, the land became waste. The land fell into a state that could well be described in the terms used to describe the state of the earth at the beginning - void, waste and empty. Now, the Babylonian captivity of Israel was a judgment upon their unbelief and their idolatry, and the waste state into which the land fell was surely a part of that judgment; and it would therefore seem that "in the beginning," also, the desolation was the result of a judgment upon a former creation.

But what is the point of this? The issue must have been this - as it has always been - that God was not allowed to fill all things. God's place was either shared with other things, or God was driven out. The end of this present world, as is shown to us in the New Testament, is going to be like that. There will be a point at which God will be finally rejected by this world, and will have no place. We are moving fast toward that time. What will be the result? It will be the burning up of this world - judgment, destruction - and a longer or shorter period of desolation before there is a new heaven and a new earth, and all things are created anew. Judgment is always upon this one thing - as to whether God is all and in all, or not. Therefore enlargement - the fullness which is God's thought - rests upon this matter of God having full place; and that is the basis of all testing of faith. God presses this point closer and closer as we go on: whether we will believe God sufficiently to let Him have His place in an impossible situation.

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 15 - (The Fullness of God as Light)