The 8 Aspects of Redemption - Part 1 — T. Austin-Sparks

The Church as God’s Second-Greatest Object

We have now reached a point in our consideration which makes it quite impossible for us to take time for review. It is necessary for us to go right on, sufficient to say that we have been and still are occupied with the eight aspects of redemption.

We have dealt with six of those, the Church, and we approach this matter as we have every other with the question, the Church. The greatest object of God in this universe is his Son. The second greatest object with God in this universe is the Church.

Those two are put together. Here is the statement of Scripture, gave him to be head over all things, to the Church, which is his body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all. The Church, the fullness of, if the Church needs Christ, Christ needs the Church.

The Church Chosen in Christ and Called Out of the Nations

We begin by asking what is the Church? And in a few concise phrases we answer that question. Firstly, the Church is a particular body of people chosen in Christ before the world was. That is precisely stated in Ephesians 1 verse 4.

There it is stated Christ was chosen. The Church or this particular body of people was chosen in him. Just as definitely as Christ was chosen and appointed, so was the Church. Secondly, the Church is a body of people called out of the nations to be a heavenly people now, not hereafter in ages to come, but now.

That is definitely stated in Acts 15 verse 40. And it is that to which our Lord referred when he said, I will build my Church. Thirdly, the Church is a body of people who are not just so many individuals, and although, but although called individually, they were never chosen individually, never chosen separately, but as a whole.

Very important to remember that the work of the Holy Spirit is always to make real that which has been eternally determined and appointed by God. And so the work of the Holy Spirit, not being an afterthought, but according to plan, is to make real and to make working, operative, this eternal oneness in and with Christ, which is the purpose of God.

The Church as the Eternal and Invisible Body of Christ

Now I'm going to do something that I do not often do, but whenever I have done it, it has got me into trouble. I'm going to read a paragraph from a book. Trouble is this, that if ever I have done that, afterward everybody has wanted the book, or to know what it is in order to get a copy, and I have found myself involved in all that the book contained, whereas I have only quoted from it.

That's just a hint to you. Please don't rush at me to know what the book is. But here is something from a book published several years ago, which is put in a very much better way than ever I could put it, and I give it to you because it is not mine.

It is essential to the right consideration of this subject, that is the Church, that the magnificence of the New Testament concept of the Church be apprehended. In the epistles to the Ephesians and to the Colossians, the view of the Church, which is Christ's body, is set forth.

It is there seen as the ideal, invisible, indivisible, inviolable company of the redeemed of the present age. None but the truly regenerate have part therein. None save the elect partake of its blessedness.

Failure and defection are unknown to it. Into it the pretender and the hypocrite cannot come. Breach or division it cannot know. Its unity is unbreakable. Its calling and glory heavenly. Its relationship to Christ and intimate, its destiny bound up in him in splendor inconceivable.

Through the centuries of our era, each marching generation but brings a contribution to it. While historically its members are being called one by one and incorporated into it, in its completeness and glory it is ever before the eye of God.

Indeed, it has been in his heart from before all time. From their heavenly vantage points, the angelic orders observe it and are impressed and enlightened concerning the manifold wisdom of its divine architect.

Swift ebbing years of this age, Christ himself is its builder. Adding stone to stone to this temple, exceeding magnifico, himself the while abiding that day when at last complete, sanctified, beautiful, spotless, and radiant with heavenly glory, it shall be presented to himself and taken into the full enjoyment of an eternal association of blessedness.

The features of which are at present disclosed. I'm going to quote something else from that book in a minute, but I am quite sure that you agree that that on the one side is no exaggeration, on the other side it does present us with something of tremendous account to God, to Christ, and to ourselves.

They have found some difficulty with some of those statements, but you must remember that the whole statement is made from heaven's and God's standpoint and not from ours. That is how he sees it. Eternally he may be seeing the condition of things at present down here may be another matter, but that is God's eternal conception and that is how God will eternally have it.

It will be like that and eventually it will prove to have been like that. Difficult to see, but nevertheless if we could see from God's standpoint we should see that every sentence of that statement is true.

Let us suspend our difficulties for a little while and go on. The church is a definite object or entity. It is not just an abstract idea. It is not an imaginary thing. It is a reality in the mind of God and in its actual existence when it is seen according to its true constitution and not man's constitution.

The church is of immense value and importance to God and to Christ. As we have read it is declared to be his. The greater values of Christ, his fullness for the church, in the church, to the church. We have the statement of God's word about it.

We have the history of the church to bear it out as to its continuance, its persistence, its very survival. And if we needed more evidence of its importance and its value we can always get it from one quarter which gives very irreligious solicitude for God's interests.

Satan’s Opposition to the True Church

Satan hates the church as he hates Christ. There has been more trouble over the church than over anything else. It is saying a lot. Come back to the book and I'm very glad that I'm not saying this firsthand.

Listen to the Christian age. A minority of believers has endeavored to carry out in corporate life these scriptural principles. The bitterest and most implacable opposition has come to them. Not from the world but from organized Christendom.

That is the system that men call the church. By this powerful organization they have been in turn oppressed, misrepresented, persecuted, reviled, ridiculed, and ignored. Their persistence from century to century has supplied the proof, practicability, of these principles.

A church being in the will of God. I have another book. This is about the church. Against such a transcendent truth affecting as it does the glory of God and the person of Christ, it is not a matter of surprise that the arch adversary should set himself with his utmost might and his most persistent and ingenious devices both by opposition and by imitation.

And a lot more like that. That came out of the statement that if there is one thing more than the Lord Jesus himself that Satan hates, it is the church and any true representation. I should like very much to spend some time speaking about the representation of the church.

The necessity of it, the possibility of it, the nature of it. You will see I'm sure before we get much further that we've got to exclude a great deal. We may come back to a closing word on that later.

The Nine Biblical Titles of the Church

But we are asking why the church? And I think the best way of answering that question is found in considering the various names or titles given to it in the word of God. There are a number of such titles as you know.

I think I would be right in saying that there are nine main titles for the church. Maybe others subsidiary but in the main there are nine. Each one needs a meeting to itself. If we were to really consider these titles which are given to the church, we should be getting very near to an answer to this question.

Why the church? Let us run through them with a bare comment or two upon each. The first title given to the church is but there it is necessary for us again to understand our terms or our words. We speak of a house, immediately think of a structure, a building.

We pass along the street and we look at buildings. We say that is a nice house or an ugly house or an unusual. That is how we use the word. It is necessary for us to understand that that is not the sole meaning of the word as it is used in connection with the house of God.

We should be nearer the truth if we change the word into the household because that is the word is inclusive of the three ideas. One the structure, building that is in the very word that is used. The content of the house, what is in it and three the arrangement of the house.

The contents are deployed, arranged, set out, their place, their position and so on. And then there is a fourth idea in the word. It is the government structure, content, the arrangement, order and the government of the house.

That's all in this one word house of God who can see would be profitably spent upon. First of all it is God's. It is God's. Man does not make this and it is impertinent to take hold of it and make it man.

The ownership of this building vested in God himself. What is in this house is there because God has put it there and nothing, no one can come and have a place in the house of God except God puts him or her there.

You can't join the house of God at your own choice willy-nilly. You may talk about joining the church but that belongs to another realm of things altogether. In the New Testament the Lord added to the church them that were being saved.

The Lord added. In this only those whom the Lord include are in the house of God. The order in the house of God is God's order. God has an order for his house and he is very particular about his order.

If we should ignore that, overlook that, set that aside, it is to our own loss, our own detriment. We shall find that in our lives there will be frustration, limitation, will not be setting his seal upon us.

God has an order. The Holy Spirit is the custodian of that order and to be under the government of the Holy Spirit means to come into a divine order. God is a God of order. Satan is the God of anarchy and lawlessness.

God is very particular about his order. You read the first letter to the Corinthians and see. Our placing in the house of God is the prerogative of God by the Holy Spirit. The place that we occupy, the function that we perform is God appointed and must be so.

If we try to do what God has never called us to do we shall be a misfit in the house of God. Under the Holy Spirit's government if we are content with that for which the Lord has brought us into his house, content with that, we'll be at rest.

It will be ease and not friction superintends his own house. It is his government of his house because it is his house. And I repeat in this other connection that it is nothing less or other than impertinence to come into God's house and upset the order or try to impose our order.

We must ever seek the order of the Holy Spirit and to be subject to him in the house of God. So much for number one out of nine. Second, the tabernacle and temple of God are identical in purpose. The difference only relates to certain conditions which we will not stay to explain, leave such details aside in our hastening on.

The Church as God’s Tabernacle and Temple

Identical in purpose, tabernacle and temple of God. There are two ideas in the main connected with this designation. Firstly, the place where God is. The place where God chooses to be. And you know dear friends, there is a place where God chooses to be and where he can be found.

And normally, normally that is in his heart, in his temple, in his tabernacle, in the church. The church is supposed to be, intended to be the place where you find God, where God is. That's not a building.

That's the people of God, that you should find him there. He chooses a place for himself. How much there is in the Old Testament illustrated of this. But his own son's words are wheresoever two or three are gathered into my name, there I am.

It's about the enunciation of an eternal principle that God chooses to be in a place. There you find him. He chooses to locate himself, to locate himself. Oh how one is tempted to enlarge upon that. Believe me, if you as a believer, as a Christian, detach yourself from the Lord's people and go off on your own independent way, you will be before long like Thomas, where the Lord is not.

And like Thomas, you will not find the Lord until you come back with the other disciples. There's a lot more to that. But there it is. God has chosen his temple, his spiritual temple now, as the place where he will meet us.

He can be found. And it is the place where he speaks. It should be so when it is according to his mind. It is. It is the place where he speaks. And I venture to go this further step and say that the nearer the thing corresponds to God's idea of the church, the more fully will you hear him speak.

It is there that you will hear more from the Lord, from the Lord, than you will if you are where the thing does not either so much or at all approximate to his conception of the temple. Secondly, it is where God is worshipped.

There's one idea always associated with the tabernacle and the temple, and that is holiness unto the Lord, the place of worship. Should I change that? Seeing that the temple is now not just a structure, but a people.

It is a worshipping people. That is the temple, a worshipping people. And what is worship? We've often defined worship as the drawing of everything God wants, everything unto the Lord. That is holiness or wholeness unto the Lord, everything to him.

The Church as a Chosen Heavenly Nation

So should the church be. That is God's mind for the church. On to number three, Peter will tell us in his first letter, chapter two, verse nine, that the church is a chosen nation, a nation. We have a lot of light thrown upon this in the Old Testament, as you know.

There are three things here connected with this conception of the church as a nation. That is a people, as we said at the beginning, taken out of the nations for his name to be made here and now a heavenly nation of a different order.

The very word heavenly, of course, carries that with it. A heavenly nation out from the nations and yet in the midst of the nation. There are three things connected with that. Firstly, there is the principle or law of separation.

That clearly is illustrated and enforced in the case of Israel as the earthly type of this church, separate from the nations. Israel lost its very integration, its vocation, its power, its glory and everything when it lost that distinctiveness from the other nations and allowed a bridge to be built between it and the other nation, worshipping their gods.

That was why Israel went into captivity, just that. The lost distinctiveness as a nation. And the Old Testament is a very forceful illustration, a very powerful object lesson of spiritual principles. But if that is true in a temporal way, an earthly way, how much more true is it and must it be in the spiritual and the heavenly and the eternal.

Distinct. One thing has accounted for more loss of glory, power, influence and the presence of God than perhaps anything else in the case of the church during the centuries has been the world getting into it and it getting into the world.

The lost distinct separation. The nation was a constituted as well as a separated people. It was separated and my word was it not separated from Egypt. Pharaoh tried to parley on that matter, just that they should leave a little behind, a little attachment.

No, the Lord said through Moses, not a hoof of a single animal should remain in Egypt. And look at the breach that God made and the gap that he put between Israel and Egypt. It's all very illustrative.

But then when he got them out, he constituted a nation. They came out a multitude. We might almost say a rabble, but then God took them in hand to form and constitute them into an entity with spiritual laws and principles governing every detail of their lives, right under heaven, where nothing of this world could meet the need.

Resources all from above. A constituted people on heavenly principles under heavenly government. That is the church. And thirdly, as Peter tells us in this comprehensive statement, to show forth the excellences of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.

The vocation of the nation is to show forth the excellences of him. Please turn the tape over now and continue listening at this point on track two. Do not fast wind the recorder in either direction.