SPIRIT AS PHYSICAL FORCE.
1. WORLD OF MATTER. Ps. 104:30; 33:6; 2 Pet.
2. WORLD OF NATURE. Gen. 1: 2; Job 26: 13.
(1) We deal here with the meaning of some big modern words
(2) The student will find that we claim the Bible gives the working explanation there is of all things.
We found in our last chapter that the three fundamental characteristics of God were will, love, and light. That God was the only Spirit who could will pure will, no man can have an act of pure will, and that when we participate in God's Spirit, we have our spirit energized, and we are able to do the will of God. "We found that what was true of God the Father was true of God the Son and true of God the Holy- Ghost. The present day is the dispensation of the Holy Spirit. That is a phrase we are perfectly familiar with, but do we understand sufficiently who the Holy Ghost is? He is identical with God the Father and God the Son; and being a person He must exercise an influence, and the more pronounced the person, the more powerful His influence. What we have to recognize is, that the majority of people do not know Him as a person, they only know Him as an influence, and that is why the Holy Spirit is most popularly spoken of as an influence.
Now consider the Mundane Universe, i. e., this terrestrial world we exist in, the earthly world we live in, the rocks and trees and people we come in contact with. We have divided this theme into three parts, (a) the World of Matter, (b) the World of Nature, and (c) the World of Self. A great alteration has come over what is called "material" science to-day, and it is coming back to the Bible point of view — that at the back of everything is spirit; the material world holds itself in existence by spirit. Away in the earlier days, when the Greeks tried to explain the material world, they said it was made of "atoms," and then down the ages they got to the place where they found they could split up the atoms-, then they called those split-up elements "molecules," then they found they could split up the molecules, and the split-up molecules are made of "electrons," and they have discovered that the electron is like a solar system and behind it all is "force."
That miay be of interest or it may not, but the fact is very significant because it points out the absurd cry that the Bible and modern science do not agree, how could they? If the Bible agreed with modern science, in about fifty years both would be out of date. Every science, at one time, has been modern.
Science simply means man's attempt to explain what he knows. Another important aside is this, do not belittle the Bible and say that the Bible has only to do with man's salvation. The Bible has not only to do with man's salvation, the Bible is a universe of revelation facts that explain the world we live in, and it is simply giving a "sop to Satan" to say, what a great many modern preachers are saying, that the Bible does not pretend to tell us how the world came into existence. The Bible does, the Bible claims to be the only expositor of how the world came about, and the only expositor of how the world keeps going, and the only book that tells us how we understand the world. Look at the world of matter. (Ps. 104:30, etc.; Ps. 33: 6; 2 Pet. 3: 5.) Those three passages simply express what the Bible revelation expresses all through, that God created the world out of nothing. The Bible does not say God "emanated" the world. That is a very clever modern idea; they say that God evolved the world out of Himself. The Bible says that God "created" the world by the breath of His mouth. Meditate for one moment on that word "creation" and see what a supernatural word it is. No philosopher ever thought of it, no expounder of natural history ever imagined such a word. "We can use the words "evolution" and "emanation," but we simply do not know; what "creation" is. There is only one Being who does know, and that is God Himself, and the Bible says that God created the world by the word of His mouth. Now there are some people in this twentieth century who take hold of that statement and make it mean that all the rocks and trees and people in the world are simply manifestations of God. The Bible does not say so, the Bible says that God created the world.
What is the world of matter? For instance, I am looking at this book, I see it is bound in red covers, it is flexible, it is fairly hard, and there are black marks on it. Well, I can account for the " redness' ' and for the ' 'blackness' ' and the "flexibility" by mj* senses, but one thing I cannot describe, what the thing is that awakens these sensations! That is matter, something we do not know. The way we see things depends on our nerves, but the thing in itself that miakes us see it that way, what is that? I see that clock and will probably describe it in the same way as you will — it is hard and smooth and brown and white and I can hear a sound and see a face, and so on, everyone of these things can be described as the results of my sensations, but what is the "thing in itself" that makes me have those sensations? The way we see the things depends on ourselves, but what the thing is in itself, we do not know, that is we do not know what matter is. The Bible says it is created by God, the way we interpret it depends on what spirit we have.
(b) The World of Nature. That means the order that material things appear in to me. The way I explain things is by thinking, the way I begin to explain the world outside is by thinking, then if I can explain it by mind, there must have been a mind that made it. That is logical, simple and clear, therefore atheism is exactly what the Bible calls it, the belief of a fool, because an atheist says, I can explain to a certain extent what things are like outside by my mind, but there never was a mind that created it. Now we have to come to this problem, How is it that we all see and coma tc different conclusions about the world? How is it that a man can be an " atheist,' ' how is it that he can be an " agnostic,' ' how is that he can see everything "as bad as bad ca$ be"? How is it that another man sees another thing "as good as good can be"? It all depends on the spirit inside him. That is why the world of nature seems such a contradiction.
(Gen. 1:2.) There is the reconstruction of the order of things out of chaos. In the beginning God created things out of nothing, matter did not exist before God created it. It is God who created it entirely out of nothing, not out of Himself. The Bible does not say that God created, the world out of Himself, it says He created it by His breath. But Genesis 1:2 is the reconstruction out of chaos. As we pointed out when we dealt with "Man," there was probably a former order of things that was ruined by disobedience, and produced the chaos that God reconstructed the order of things out of, which we know and which we so differently interpret.
(Job 26: 13.) There the Bible says that God made the established order of things. We hear people say that if God created the established order, He is responsible for sin being here. Why the Bible says He is, and what is the proof that He is responsible? Calvary! In Colossians 1: 16 there is an allusion to what God created and for what God necessarily made Himself responsible. God created everything that was created, He created the being who became Satan, He created man who became sinner, and God holds Himself responsible for Satan and sin.
Take the next step, God did not create sin, sin is the outcome of wrong relationships between two of God's creations. Sin is a relation set up between the being revealed as Satan, and the being revealed as Adam, it is not a creation at all. Yet God holds Himself responsible for it from the very beginning, He holds Himself responsible for the possibility of sin, and the Lord Jesus Christ's life and death and resurrection are proof that He took the responsibility, and God nowhere holds man responsible for having a wrong disposition in him; you won't find one passage in the Bible where God holds a man responsible for having the heredity of sin in him, but He holds him responsible the moment he sees and understands that God can deliver him from that heredity. (John 3: 19.)
God is responsible for the established order of nature. Now there are various conflicting views about the world. If you will read carefully tire Book of Job, you will find that the world of nature is a wild contradiction from beginning to end; you cannot explain it in any satisfactory way at all. Immediately you start out to say that God is good, you will come across some facts that prove He is not. "When a man starts and says there is no God at all, he can prove his position. You may have as many accounts of the order of nature outside you, as you have human beings. The spirit inside the man makes him interpret what he sees outside, and if I do not have the Spirit of God in me, I will never interpret the world outside as God interprets it; I will have continually to shut my eyes, and to deny certain facts: I will have to do what our "Christian Science" friends do, deny that facts are facts.
Now we see the limitations of trying to dispute with a man who is an atheist. He can prove his position, you cannot disprove it to him, but immediately you get him to receive the Spirit, you will alter his logic. Paul says, ' ' The spirit of a man understands the things of a man, but does not understand the things of God." If God created nature and I have not the Spirit of God, I will never interpret the order of nature as God does; I will prove the Bible is simply a "cunningly devised old wives' fable"; prove the whole thing is a piece of idiotic Oriental tradition. If I am to understand the Bible, I must have the Spirit of God.
This is for thinking; we all know about the Spirit of God for practical living, but do we realize the need to have the Spirit of God to think with? So many Christian people use dangerous weapons against the enemies of Christianity, which one and all are really against Jesus Christ Himself, simply because they have not been renewed in "the spirit of their minds"; because they will not think on God's line; because they refuse to make their minds work. We have no business to be fools; we have no business to be stupid; we have no business to be ignorant about how God created the world, and no business to be ignorant as to how we can explain to ourselves the way that discerns the arm of the Lord all through. When I receive the Spirit of God for my practical living, He begins to stir my brain after He has transformed my practical life. Will we bring this machine, the brain, into harmony with the new line of thinking? Take an illustration in the 15th of John. Jesus laid down a remarkable principle for practical living and for practical thinking — "I am the true Vine!" Is the natural vine a false one? No, the natural vine is a shadow of the real one. "I am the Bread." Is the ordinary bread we eat false? No, the ordinary bread we eat is the shadow of the real bread. "I am the Door," and so on. Jesus Christ taught His disciples how to think by "correspondences."
If you have the Spirit of God in you, you will be able to interpret what you see with your eyes, and hear with your ears, and understand with your brain, in the light of God. "The sun shall no more be thy light by day iror the moon by night, but the Lord Himself shall be thy everlasting light. ' ' Did you ever ask what that meant spiritually? May it not mean that ordinary days and nights bring facts into your life you cannot explain, but when you receive the Spirit of God you get on the line of explaining them? For instance, we cannot explain life, yet it is a very common-place fact that we are alive; we cannot explain love, we cannot explain death, we cannot explain sin, yet they are all blunt, common-sense facts. When we try to explain them in our own light, we cannot make anything of them; the world, the order of nature is a confusion; there is nothing clear about it; a confusing, wild chaos. Immediately yoa receive the Spirit of God, He energizes your spirit for practical living, and gets your brain slowly into practical thinking line, and you will begin to see God's order in all that chaos, to "discern the arm of the Lord," the Lord will explain to you the facts of common days and common nights. That is the meaning of our Lord Jesus Christ saying, "The kingdom of God is within you." If I want to understand the world, the order of nature, as the Bible reveals it, let me have the Spirit of God. (Luke 11: 13.)
(Matt. 11:25.) "I thank Thee, Father, that Thou hast revealed these things to babes." Then He thanked God fhat He was the only medium the Father had for revealing Himself, and the only way we get to understand God, and God's universe, is by the Spirit of God, and the message is given in the same passage, "Come unto Me." That is a message to His disciples, not to sinners on the outside.
Watch the outlook of your mind when you have been "born again" of the Spirit of God, and you will understand the condition of mind Jesus Christ is alluding to, "laboring and heavy laden," trying to think out what won't be thought out, and Jesus Christ's message is, "Come to Me and I will give you rest." "I am the Way." "Get the Spirit that is in Me, imparted to you from God by Me, and. you will begin to see things as I do. If you don't, you will never know God, and you will never see things as I do. Marvel not that I say unto you, You must be born again/ 9 "Born again' ' for practical thinking as well as practical seeing.
It is a strange thing in our schools and everywhere else, the indiscriminate way we are taught to think like pagans, and to live like Christians. All the thinking explanations taught in every university are pagan, every one of them, anci we train our men who teach us to think like pagans, and to live like Christians, and the consequence is what we see. What we have to do is to get our thinking into line with the living Spirit of God, to begin to take the laborious trouble to think, "to meditate on these things" and get ourselves continually harnessed in imagination to Jesus Christ. "Bringing every thought and every imagination into captivity to the Lord Jesus." Never allow your mind to run in wild speculation, that is where danger begins, that is the way the "sin of Eve" begins, when the Christian allows the mind to run off on speculative tangents, "I want to find out this and that." "Come unto Me," says Jesus, "I am the Way," the only way to live, not only the way to get saved and sanctified, but the way to think, and no man knows God, says Jesus, but the one "to whom I will reveal Him," and I will reveal Him to anyone who will come to Me.
Then take (c) the World of Self. (John 6:63.) Can Jesus Christ speak to me to-day? He can by the Holy Spirit, but if I take His words without His
Spirit they are of no avail to me. I can conjure with, them, and do all kinds of things, but they are not life. Immediately the Spirit of God is in me, He brings to my remembrance what Jesus said, and makes it live, and it is the Spirit of God in me making alive the words of Jesus outside me, that enables me to assimilate them. God exercises a remarkable power in taking texts out of the Bible context 'and putting them into the context of our life. You will often find a verse come to you right out of the Bible setting, and begin a new setting in your life; it has become alive and has become a precious, secret possession to you. See that you keep it a secret possession and do not "east your pearls before swine' ' — the strong words of the Lord Jesus Christ.
If one may use an ingenious symbol, it would be that Jesus Christ was crucified in the place of a 1 ' skull, ' ' and that is where He is always crucified, that is where He is always put to shame to-day, viz.: in the heads of men who won't bring their thinking into line with the Spirit of God. If they are inspired by the Holy Spirit, they always build their words on the words of Jesus Christ or of God. That is the way we are renewed in the Spirit of our mind, not by an impulse of the Spirit, not by an impression, but by being gripped by the word of God. The old habit of getting "a word from God" is the right one, and don't give up till you get one, never go on an impression, it will go, there is nothing in it, nothing lasting unless the word becomes living and brings back to remembrance some word of His. That is how the world of self is made just as Jesus Christ wants it to be, that is the way we are able to discern the arm of the Lord; if we do not, supposing myself is ruled by another spirit away from Jesus, then I will explain the world according to that spirit, the spirit that rules myself. If it is I, my right to myself, I will never explain anything like Jesus Christ does, I will begin to patronize Him. If I da not dare to patronize Jesus, I will patronize the apostle Paul, and if I don't patronize Paul, I will begin to sneer at the Pentateuch. Anything to appear up to date, because the spirit that is in man, no matter how cultured, no matter how moral, no matter how religious, if it is not the Spirit of God, must be "scattering" away from Jesus Christ; no matter how sweet and delightful, how favorable it may appear to men, "he that gathereth not with. Me scattereth. " " I am the Way; ' ' not only the Spirit of God for living, but the Spirit of God for thinking.
(Ezek. 1:20.) The picture there is that the ultimate working of everything in harmony with God is by the Spirit of God. The cherubim are a true picture of the "mystical body of Christ." You remember that Moses was told to make the cherubim, he was also told previously that he must make no image of anything in Heaven above, or on earth beneath, and the cherubim are figures of nothing like anything in Heaven or earth. Why? Because they are like something that is being made now. the mystical body of Christ. You find it figured in the garden of Eden, the only way back to the tree of life is by the mystical body; salvation and sanctification mean not only possessed by the Spirit for living, but possessed by the Spirit for thinking. Cherubim were guardians into the holiest of all, and when the mystical body of Christ is complete, all the machinery of this earth will be moved and directed by the Spirit of God.
There is a great difference between interpretation by intuition and interpretation by thinking. One is never safe, the other always is. If you bring your mind into captivity to the Holy Spirit, and be renewed in it, you will get to what is termed the "Nous." The "Nous" simply means the responsible intelligence; up to that point in your natural life, and that point in your spiritual life, you get things by intuition, impulse, but there is no responsibility. See to it whenever you get to the point of responsible intelligence, then realize that you have come to a sure line of thinking. That is what the writer to the Hebrews refers to in Hebrews 5: "By this time you ought to be teachers," but you want spooned meat again; by this time they ought to be robust and mature, no longer either children or fools, but men and women able to discern between right and wrong, good and bad, with responsible, thoroughly informed intelligences. How many of us have allowed God to bring us there spiritually? How many of us can think along Jesus Christ's line? How many of us have to say whenever any such subject is taught. "I leave those things for other people"? "We have no business to, we have all to be our best for God.
We have not only to be good lovers, but good thinkers, and it is along that line we can test the spirits.
How are we going to test the teaching that is abroad to-day? Immediately you get a real Christian experience in a man or woman and the head not informed, not disciplined, the intelligence becomes a hotbed for heresy. If we would revolutionize our thinking and bring our imaginations back again to the context, back to God's heart, the Bible, which not only explains God, but explains the world we live in; not only explains the things that are right, but the things that are wrong!
If I start out with an idea and say, "Everything is going well, and is bright and happy," then there is a sudden earthquake, someone is killed by lightning, tremendous floods, a volcano, or a shocking murder, or worse crime; every conclusion you like to come to will be flatly contradicted by the world outside, by the facts you see. The Bible and the world outside agree, they are an absolute puzzle until you receive the Spirit of God. When you receive the Spirit of God, you are taken first of all into a new realm, a totally new kingdom, then, if you will bring your mind into harmony, and every thought into captivity, and begin slowly to discipline and educate your character, you begin to discern not only order in the Bible, but your eyes are opened and the secrets a,re understood and grasped. We read history and begin to find out the way God has been working; we look at our own lives and find not a lot of haphazard chances, but that we are working out some preconceived idea of God we do not know; we begin to find, to our amazement, that our lives are answers to the prayers of the Holy Ghost, and back of everything is the tremendous, wonderful mind of God, until a human being can go to the length of saying what the apostle Paul said, "We have the mind of Christ.' ' That is a good deal more than the Spirit of Christ. Kemember, the mind of Christ means thinking like Christ; Jesus never thought from any other centre but God. "The words that I speak to you they are spirit and life." Where did He get them from? He got them from the Spirit that was in Him, He never spoke from the other spirit, from His right to Himself, that is why the tongue in Christ got to the right place, and that is how the tongue and the brain in you and me will get to the right place, when once we learn to obey the Spirit of God for thinking. Thank God there is a line of explanation for everything under Heaven! Jesus Christ does satisfy the last aching abyss of the heart by our reception of the Spirit, and obedience to Him. We do feel that one word ringing all over our life mentally, " Obey! Obey! ' ' Those of you who know it in the moral realm, put it into the intellectual. Obey! Is the imagination in captivity to Jesus? Is the thinking along His line, being renewed in the spirit of my mind? Is this in absolute harmony with the Lord Jesus Christ?
The day we live in, mentally, is a day^ of wild imaginations everywhere, unchecked imaginations in music, in literature, and, worst of all, in Scripture. People going off on the wildest speculations, getting hold of one line and then running clean off on a tangent, explaining everything on that line; that is not according to the Spirit of God. There is no royal road, none of us get there all at once, it is by steady discipline, when I am willing that God should bring my brain into harmony with the Spirit He has put in my heart.