Faith Unto Enlargement Through Adversity # 12

The Key of Faith (continued)

God's Reaction Against Emptiness

Let us now look for a few minutes at these words, these terms, that we have been employing. We will take for the present just this matter of enlargement. We can use the alternative word "fullness" - and we shall do so, quite extensively - but I have here a special thought in my mind in preferring this word "enlargement." This whole matter of enlargement, whether the Lord is going to enlarge us, whether we are going to be enlarged, is a very living question and issue, for enlargement is a governing thought of God. All the way through the Bible, as we have seen, God's thought is enlargement. God is always thinking in terms of enlargement, of increase, of final fullness. God never finds any pleasure at all in emptiness and in smallness. God dislikes emptiness, and always reacts against it.

As we open our Bibles at the first page of Genesis, what is almost the first thing that we read? After: "In the beginning God ...," and then a few words more, we read: "And the earth was without form and void" - that is "waste and empty" - "and the Spirit of God ..." the earth was empty, and the Spirit of God - did what? - reacted against the state of emptiness. It was as though God said, 'This is not My mind at all; this is altogether contrary to My thought. I am against this, and I am going to do something about it.' God would have everything in Divine fullness - that is, in abundance. That is His thought for the earth, and for His people. And so the Spirit of God, brooding over this void, this emptiness, begins to work, and every stage and phase of the Divine activity is to fill. He fills the earth with the vast range of the vegetable kingdom - seeds in abundance and life within the seeds capable of endless production and reproduction. He fills the earth with the immense variety of the animal kingdom. He fills the sea, and says: "Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures" (Genesis 1:20). And then, creating man, He says: "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth" (v. 28). 'I am against this emptiness, this void'. And on He moves on that principle, governed by that thought. Reaching Abraham, He says: "I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heavens, and as the sand which is upon the seashore" (Genesis 22:17). Comprehend that, if you can! That is Divine thought. Beyond all comprehension, God thinks in terms of enlargement.

How much can be gathered up in the Bible on this matter! The Lord Jesus, for instance, came to express the thoughts of God in practical terms, and, among many other things, He spoke of a great feast which was made. The guests were bidden, but they did not come - they made excuses. And so the man who gave the feast said to his servant: "Go out into the highways and hedges, and constrain them to come in, that my house may be filled" (Luke 14:15-24). Here we see Christ bringing God's thoughts into this world - 'That my house may be filled.' But perhaps in the New Testament the day of Pentecost is the greatest example and expression of this Divine thought. When the Spirit came, a mighty, rushing wind "filled all the house where they were sitting" (Acts 2:2). And then it is applied to each believer: "Be filled with the Spirit" (Ephesians 5:18).

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 13 - (The Danger of Passivity)