Chapter 12 – Agag, or the Subtleties of the Self-Life

(1 SAM. 15:32, 33.)

Saul and Agag both teach the same great lesson and warning, namely, the peril of a self-centered life, but they teach it in somewhat different ways.

Agag belonged to the race of Amalek and the family of Esau, who through their entire genealogy represent the life of the flesh. From the very beginning of the human race God has drawn the line of demarcation between two races — the fleshly and the spiritual. Just outside the gate of Eden the division began. The family of Seth called themselves by the name of the Lord, and the race of Cain went off and built their city of culture and pride, and became pioneers of worldliness and wickedness. The separation, alas! soon began to disappear; and in the days of Noah the two races had mingled and intermarried, and the progeny was a generation of monsters of iniquity, so degenerate and depraved that God turned with loathing from the race and pronounced the awful sentence, “The end of all flesh is come before Me; I will destroy man from off the face of the earth.”

After the Flood God chose a separate family, the line of Abraham, and again endeavored to keep the chosen people separate. All along that line we see the earthly off-shoots of the family tree separating from the central trunk and going out into the world. The first of these was Ishmael, the type of the spirit of bondage and sin. The next of these was Esau, the progenitor of a whole race who inherited the earthly spirit of their father, who, for a morsel of meat, sold his birthright, and afterward married with the daughters of Canaan and became as corrupt and polluted as they. In the same line were the descendants of Lot’s unnatural daughters, the Moabites and the Ammonites.

Above all these, the race of Esau and Amalek were the representatives of the spirit of the flesh and the world. This was the reason that God pronounced the decree of their extermination. We find that, when Israel went out of Egypt and started on their journey through the wilderness on their way to the Land of Promise, Amalek was the first to attack them. It is not difficult to see in this the foreshadowing of the fact that the first adversary that we have to contend with, when leaving our sinful past of bondage and iniquity, is the carnal nature in our own hearts, which tries to force us back to “the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity.” This is what Agag represents, and this is what each of us has found to our cost to be a very real element in the experience of a Christian life.

The word Agag means ruler, and represents the spirit of self-will, self-assertion, and independence in the human heart. Its prototype is Lucifer, the prince of light and glory, who, being lifted up with pride and refusing to be controlled, turned from an angel to a fiend, and has become the desperate leader of the rebellious hosts of hell. We see it next in the supreme temptation of the Fall — “Ye shall be as gods ” — the desire for supremacy. We see it in the spirit of human ambition, in the Oriental despot, in the world conqueror, in the society belle and the political “boss.” All belong to the same family. They are of the race of Amalek and the house of Agag. Their cry is like the prodigal, “Give me the portion of goods that falleth to me,” and let me go away from parental control, and do as I please.

There has been no age when this spirit was so rampant as our own. It appears to us as mannishness and calls itself liberty, but its end is license, lawlessness, and Antichrist, that “lawless one” who is yet to embody the elements of human wickedness and pride, and end the present dispensation by defying God and man, and perishing, like his father, the devil, in his presumptions. This spirit is found in every human heart, and may be disguised in many insidious forms. It may call itself by illustrious names, and ape the highest ambitions and the noblest pretensions, but it is Agag and Satan every time. The thing in you that wants to rule, wants to have its own way, to be independent, to refuse control, to despise reproof, is wrong in its very nature. The very first thing you need in order to be of any use anywhere is to be thoroughly broken, completely subjected, and utterly crucified in the very core and center of your will. Then you will accept discipline, and learn to yield and obey in matters indifferent; and your will shall be so merged in His that He can use you as a perfectly adjusted instrument. Henceforth you shall will only what God wills, and choose only what God chooses for you.

This is the real battleground of human salvation; this is the Waterloo of every soul; this is the test question of every redeemed life. This was the point where Saul lost his kingdom and Agag lost his life, and where still eternal destinies are lost or won as we learn the lesson or refuse to be led in triumph by our conquering Lord.

God had determined that the race of Amalek and the house of Agag should be utterly exterminated. They were not to be spared, but to be destroyed. It was a case of no compromise. There was nothing good in them. The least element of Agagism was destructive, and the whole community, with all their goods and belongings, must be put out of existence, just as the effects of a household where some one had died of some contagious disease must be wholly given to the flames. This is God’s decree against the flesh in us. It cannot be cleansed; it cannot be improved; it cannot be cultivated; it cannot be educated into good ideas and principles. The flesh must be exterminated.

Now, what is the flesh? Is it the bad principle in man? Is it some outward or inward evil which can be cut away like a tumor by a surgical operation? Listen: “The carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So, then, they that are in the flesh cannot please God.” There is the uncompromising decree of the total depravity and the hopeless condition of the flesh. But now, what is the flesh? Listen again: “But ye are not in the flesh, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you.” There is the distinction clear as a ray of celestial light. Every man who has not the Spirit of God is in the flesh; therefore, everything outside the Spirit of God is flesh. Therefore, the flesh is not simply the sinful part of human nature, but the whole of human nature. It is the natural man. It is the whole creature, and the whole thing is corrupt and polluted. The tree is so crooked that you cannot straighten it without cutting it in two. The tumor is so interwoven with the flesh that you cannot cut it without killing the man. There is no remedy. There is no hope. The old life must be laid down, and the new creation, wholly born out of heaven and baptized with the Spirit of God, must take its place as a new creation, as an experience so supernatural and divine that its possessor can truly say, “I am no longer the former man, I have died and Christ has taken my place. It is no longer I, but Christ that liveth in me.”

Don’t try to sanctify the flesh. Don’t attempt to evolutionize the kingdom of heaven out of the kingdom of hell. It is not evolution, it is creation. It is not morals or manners, it is a miracle of grace and power. Take no risks upon the old man. He will fail you every time. You may think your trained hawk is a dove, but in an unsuspecting moment its beak will be buried in your flesh. Your little wolf may have all the manners of the lamb, but in an evil hour it will destroy all your lambs, and perhaps rend you limb from limb. It is hopelessly, eternally corrupt. It cannot please God. It must be utterly dethroned, renounced, and crucified with Christ.

We next see the attempt of man to compromise with the flesh and to disregard this Divine decree of its extermination. Saul spared Agag that he might grace his triumph, and he kept the best of the spoil that he might sacrifice unto the Lord his God. He obeyed the commandment of the Lord, to a certain extent. He defeated Amalek and destroyed the nation, in a sense. He did all God told him as far as it was agreeable, and he took his own way just where it was pleasant. His obedience, therefore, was not really obedience to God, but, in fact, self-will. He retained just enough of the flesh to destroy the whole service. The very essence of the disobedience was compromise. He tried to put the evil to a good use. It was a very insult in the face of Heaven to bring the forbidden thing and offer it to the God he had defied.

This is the spirit of modern religious culture. “Don’t go too far! Don’t be extreme! Don’t be Puritanical! Go easy! Be liberal!” In other words: “Meet the world halfway. Marry that scoundrel to save him. Take that saloon-keeper into the church because you can make good use of his money. Put that brazen-faced woman up in the choir because she will draw her theatrical set to hear her sing. Go to the theater and the play with your husband, to get him to go to church with you on Sunday.”

Nonsense! In the first place, in such an unequal contest on the enemy’s ground the devil will always get the best of you. Instead of being saved, the husband will drag to his level the woman that ventured on forbidden ground. Instead of bringing her set under the influence of religion, the operatic singer will bring the church to the level of her set, and turn it into a clubhouse and a concert-room. The saloon-keeper’s money will moderate the tone of the preaching, so that it will be a comfort unto Sodom, so that vice and sin can sit unchecked, and even count itself the very buttress and pillar of the holy Cause of Christ.

Think you that God will accept such service? Will He who owns the treasures of the Universe, and could Create a mountain or a mine of gold in a moment, and send a thousand angels to sing in His sanctuaries — will He accept the money that is stained with the blood of souls and polluted with the filth of dethroned purity and honor? Will He accept the meretricious service that is sold for sordid gain? Will He go begging to the devil’s shrine, and asking permission to let go his captives that they may be saved? Shame upon our unfaithfulness and our compromise! Oh, for the sword of a Samuel to hew in pieces the compromises that are an offence to Heaven and a disgrace to the Bride of the Lamb! We see the fawning pleading of the flesh for indulgence. Agag came forth, walking delicately, mincing like a silly, coquettish girl, smiling, seeking by his blandishments to disarm opposition, to win favor, looking like an incarnation of gentleness and innocence. A perfect gentleman! Surely, he could not harm a child! Surely, no one could dream of doing him harm! Ah, that is the old flesh pleading for his life, pointing out its refinement, its culture, its graces, the good that it is doing and wants to do, its claim upon your consideration and regard. Surely, such a beautiful gentle creature should not be rudely slain. But back of all its disguises and fawnings the Holy Ghost will show you, if you will let Him, the serpent’s coil, the dragon’s voice, and the festering corpse of the charnel house.

Death is not always repulsive at first sight. The daughter of Jairus was beautiful in her shroud, and a flush of life still lingered on her cheek, but she was as dead as Lazarus stinking in his tomb. And so the sweet-faced creature, with her fawning charms, that brilliant minister with his intellectual sophistries, that voice that sings like an angel in the choir, are as corrupt and polluted as the poor creature that lies in yonder hospital dropping to pieces in the last stages of corruption, or that red-handed assassin reeking with the blood of his victim. They are both flesh, only at different stages of moral putrefaction.

We see in Agag the flesh feigning death. “Surely,” said Agag, “the bitterness of death is past.” And so you will find plenty of people, in pulpits and pews, on platforms and in obscure corners, who would make you believe that they are utterly dead, and yet, when you get a good look at them, remind you of corpses walking in grave clothes. They are so conscious of their deadness that you know they are alive! They are so proud of their humility that you would rather they were proud than humble. They are so constantly in their own shadow that they try you by their religious egotism. Surely, dead people don’t know it, don’t think about it, are unostentatious, unobtrusive, modest, simple, natural, free, and, like good water, without taste, color, or consciousness. Oh, for this blessed simplicity and this place of self-forgetting rest! Oh, for this fulfilment of the prayer, “Lord, let me die so dead that I won’t know it.”

Beloved, there is no danger so great, especially among Christians somewhat advanced, as that of counting ourselves in a place where we really do not live. There is nothing so hardening to the heart as to take the place of self-surrender and then live a life of self-indulgence, self-will, the while adding to it the greater fault of self-complacency; calling things holy which are not so. We are not to reckon that we are “reckoned” dead, but rather we are to reckon on a reality, to insist upon it, and take nothing less from God or from ourselves. Oh, that we would dare to call things by their right names and have no counterfeit, even ourselves.

Agag could not deceive Samuel. The old man pierces him through with one glance of the Holy Ghost, and, looking at his mincing figure, we can imagine him saying, “I know you with all your fawning. You are an old murderer. You are a selfish, cruel tyrant. Your sword has made many a mother childless. Many an innocent victim has been crushed beneath your lust of hate, and back of all your smiles there is a skeleton and a serpent’s sting.” With that sharp sword he cut through his blandishments, and hewed him to pieces before the Lord.

Sin never stops till it reaches its worst, and God shows us in a single sample the possibilities of the evil to which the tiniest seed and fairest bud of selfishness may yet ripen. Let us ask God to expose it in our hearts; let us open our being to the sword of Samuel, which is the sword of the Holy Ghost, described in the Epistle to the Hebrews in solemn but blessed words, “The Word of God is quick and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”

To be delivered from any form of self and sin, we need to be willing to see it, to recognize it, to call it by its right name, to throw off its disguise, to brand it with its true character, to pass sentence of death upon it, to stand to the sentence without compromise, to consent to no reprieve, to give God the right to slay it; and then there is power enough in the sword of the Spirit, in the fire of the Holy Ghost, in the blood of Calvary, in the faithfulness and love and grace of God, to make us dead unto sin, and alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.



Chapter 13 – Jonah or the Shadow of Self

“Therefore now, O Lord, take, I beseech Thee, my life from me; it is better for me to die than to live.” Jonah 4:3.

This was the best prayer that Jonah ever uttered, if he had only really meant it in the right sense. The greatest need of Jonah’s life was to die to Jonah, and his life is just a great object-lesson of the odiousness and the foolishness of the spirit of selfishness in any mortal, especially in any one who professes, or pretends to work for God and the souls of men.

The story of Jonah is soon told. He was the first of the prophets whose writings have come down to us in the Sacred Canon. He lived in the reign of Jeroboam II, and it was through the instrumentality of the prophet that the monarch was enabled to raise Israel from the depression into which the nation had fallen, and lift her to the highest point of power and greatness in all her history.

Sent as the prophet of good tidings to his own people, Jonah gladly went, and by his inspired messages cheered on his countrymen, until they had subdued their enemies on every side, and won back long-lost territory from all their foes.

Had Jonah’s career terminated at this point he would have gone into history as one of the most successful and brilliant of Israel’s long line of prophets. But God gave him a new commission, and sent him with a message of warning to the city of Nineveh, the mighty capital of the Assyrian Empire. This was to Jonah not only unexpected but unwelcome. An enthusiastic patriot, he did not want to do anything that could bring the favor of God to the hated enemies of his country. And so the whole self-will of the man rose up in rebellion, and he determined not to go. Disobedience always brings separation from God, and so Jonah was inevitably driven from the presence of God, and looked about for some place where he might escape from the All-Seeing Eye whose glance he could not bear.

It was not difficult to find a chain of providences all working in the direction which he desired. And finding a ship at Joppa bound for the coast of distant Tarshish, he secured a passage at once and started for the chosen hiding-place. He was soon overtaken by the messengers of God’s mercy and judgment, and, thrown into the sea as a sacrifice to appease the storm, he was swallowed by the great fish which God had prepared, and then flung out from his living tomb, a resurrected man.

God’s message met Jonah again — his commission was renewed to go to Nineveh, and preach the preaching that God commanded.

This time he went without any evasions or questionings, and for a time it really seemed that he was indeed a crucified man. But, alas, for human self-assertion! It was not long before Jonah came to the surface again. As long as his work succeeded and the people listened and repented, he was satisfied. But when God met the penitence of the Ninevites with His mercy, and canceled His judgment upon them, Jonah was disappointed and fiercely angry, because his reputation as a prophet had been ruined by the failure of his threatenings. Sitting down under the shade of a gourd, outside the city gates, he fretted and scolded like a petulant child; and finally passed out of sight altogether, under his withered gourd, as a spectacle of humiliation and contempt, all the glory of his really wonderful work blighted by the dark shadow of himself, which he threw over it in his folly and selfishness. There are many lessons taught us by this extraordinary life.

We see a man who succeeds most wonderfully in religious work so long as his work is congenial, but fails completely and utterly breaks down under the first severe test of real character. Jonah did splendid work so long as everything went all right; but the moment things went against him he went to pieces.

How many of us there are who, in the sunshine of religious prosperity, seem to be extraordinary workers and even ideal saints. It is the test that tells. Character is more than work, and God is leading us, if we will only let Him, through the tests which will bring us to the death of self, and to the place where He can use us as

“Only His messengers, ready
His praises to sound at His will,
Or willing should He not require us
In silence to wait on Him still.”

We see in Jonah a man who obeys and serves God, as long as it suits him, but is a stranger to that obedience which knows no choice except the Lord’s will. “Ye are My friends,” the Master says, “if ye do whatsoever I command you.” It is no evidence of friendship to Christ to do some things to please Him; to do much that is good and right. The true friend does whatsoever He commands.

We see in Jonah a man destitute of the true missionary spirit, a man who thought he was full of zeal, yet had no deep love for God or the souls of men. Jehu had zeal enough, but it was zeal for his own cause. Jonah represents those people who will work as hard as you please for their own cause, even for the Church, and the work which centers in their own sect, or family, or country, but they know nothing of the real missionary spirit. They care not for the Ninevites, the Chinese, or the Africans, and they think it unreasonable waste to pour out hundreds of thousands of pounds for the evangelization of the world, instead of spending it at home, and using it to promote the welfare of our own people.

When we disobey God, we shall soon want to leave His presence altogether. Adam’s single sin soon led to Adam’s separation from his Creator, and we find him hiding from the presence of God. It is idle to think that you can indulge in any act of disobedience and still look up in your Father’s face and call yourself His child.

Jonah had no difficulty in finding means to carry on his purpose. The devil has his providences as well as the Lord. The ship was all ready, and it was going to the right place, and Jonah was soon on board and comfortably asleep in his berth. Alas, the saddest thing about backsliding is that it brings with it the devil’s sedatives, and the soul can calmly sleep amid the fiercest storm, and complacently dream that all is well. There is nothing in all the judgments of God so terrible as a reprobate mind and a soul past feeling.

Jonah was a man pursued by God’s police, and brought to his senses by the trials and troubles which he brought upon himself and others. Thank God for the mercy that will not let us rest in our self-complacency and sin. Happy for us that we have a Father who loves us well enough to hurt us, and drive us home to His loving breast. The saddest part of the trouble of the backslider is, that others have to suffer because of his sin and folly.

Jonah’s shipmates were the first to feel the effects of his disobedience, and to wake him up to his foolhardy insensibility. Many a time it is not until our fortunes have been wrecked, and our families broken-hearted, that we find out the secret of all our troubles, and come back to Him who has smitten only that He might heal us, and broken only that He might bind us up.

What a pity that we should compel God to bring us back to Himself by the officers of judgment, instead of flying to the arms of His love, and choosing the blessing which He is determined we shall not lose.

We see in Jonah a man who had to die to himself before he could do any real good. The great lesson of Jonah’s life is the need of crucifixion to the life of self. Our Savior has used the story of Jonah as the special type of His own death and resurrection, and we know that our Savior’s cross is the pattern of ours, and that as He died so we should die to the life of self and sin. In the story of Jonah we see God trying to put Jonah out of his own way, so that God could bless him as He really wanted to do. Surely, if ever a man had a good chance to die, it was Jonah, and if he did not, it was his own fault. He speaks of that living tomb himself as the belly of Hades — the very bosom of death, and the prayer that he uttered, when in those awful depths, certainly sounded like the voice of a man who meant what he said; and when he came forth it really did seem as if Jonah was going to be out of the question henceforth. But, alas, as we shall see later, he was only half dead yet. God cannot use any but a crucified man to preach about the crucified Savior.

When Jonah came forth from the depths of death he was ready to go anywhere that God wanted him; and when we are dead to self and sin we will not have any question to ask except this one: “Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?” Then we will go to Nineveh or China, or any place the Master sends us, with glad and willing hearts.

But we see in Jonah a man who, after all, was only half dead, notwithstanding all his suffering and humiliation. For a time he goes right on, faithful and obedient. He preaches to the Ninevites the preaching that God bids him, and the most wonderful revival that ever attended any ministry follows his words, until, from the king on the throne to the meanest of his subjects, the people of Nineveh are prostrate at the feet of Jehovah and pleading for mercy. But the moment that God hears their cry, and disappoints Jonah’s predictions of their destruction, the prophet breaks completely down, and falls into a fit of petulance and anger, because God had failed to do what He had threatened, and destroyed his reputation as a prophet.

It was but another form of the same old self-life, A man may give up the selfishness that seeks its gratification in the pleasures of the world, and yet may seek the gratification of the same self-life in some religious form. A woman may cease to be the queen of society and the idol of her hero-worshipers, yet she may drink in the sweet delight of her influence and sway over the minds and hearts of men in her very work for Christ, and the influence that she wields over the hearts that she brings under her religious sway.

The orator, as he holds spellbound the hearts of thousands, even when he tells them of Jesus and salvation, may be just as selfish and self-conscious as the actor on the stage or the politician on the platform, who speaks only for his personal triumph and ambition. Jonah’s very success was his snare, and led him to forget his Master’s glory and the real good of the people that he was sent to save.

God never can use any man very much till he has grace enough to put himself entirely out of sight; for He will not give His glory to another nor share with the most valued instruments the praise that belongs to Jesus Christ alone.

We can never succeed in our service for God till we learn to cast our own shadow behind us and lose ourselves in the honor and glory of our Master. It is said that Alexander the Great had a famous horse that nobody could ride. Alexander at length attempted to tame him. He saw at a glance that the horse was afraid of his own shadow, and so, leaping into the saddle one day and turning the horse’s head to the sun, he struck his spurs into the flanks of the noble steed, and dashed off like lightning. From that hour the fiery charger was thoroughly subdued, and he never gave his master any trouble again. He could no longer see his own shadow.

Oh, that we could look into the face of our Lord, and then forever forget ourselves! Then He could use us for His own glory, and afford to share with us the glory and gladness of our work.
We see in Jonah a man whom God had to humble in the dust to save him from destroying his own work.

God loves to make us partakers with Him in the fruits of our work. So He honored Moses and Samuel and Paul, and their names have come down to us associated with their blessed service for the Lord; but this was because they loved to forget themselves, and seek only their Master’s glory. How different it was with poor Jonah! He was seeking his own glory, and God had to humiliate him, and let him fail altogether in the very thing he wanted. Surely, “God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble.” Surely he that would be chiefest may well become the servant of all; for the Master has said, “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me; for he that will save his own life shall lose it, and he that will lose it shall keep it unto life eternal.” “If any man serve Me let him follow Me, and if any man serve Me, him will My Father honor.”

Poor Jonah lost his honor because he sought it, and Paul found it because he renounced it, and sought only to live that Jesus might be satisfied, even if Paul should be forever forgotten. This is the spirit of true service, and surely this is the solemn lesson that comes down to us through that humiliating spectacle, sitting, disappointed and rejected, under his withered gourd, after the most successful ministry ever given to a human life, but one which brought no recompense to him, because he did it for himself.

We see in Jonah the picture of a man who wants to die when he is least prepared to die. It was a very great mercy that God refused to take him at his word, when he cried with childish impatience, “Lord, I beseech Thee, take away my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live.” Let us be very careful how we utter reckless prayers. Poor Elijah asked to die one day in a fit of discouragement, and we only hear of him once again as a prophet.

Jonah asked in a petulant moment that he might die, and from that moment Jonah disappears from the page of history, and passes into an oblivion which has upon it no ray of hope or light of recompense. The best way to be prepared to die is to be living for some high and noble purpose. The men that are ready to die are the men that are needed most to live for God and their fellow-men.

We learn one more lesson from Jonah’s life, and that is the true secret how to die, and then how to live for God and our own highest interest and blessing.

Thank God, Jonah’s life lifts our thoughts to another and a nobler life, even that of the Lord Jesus Christ, who has died for us, and taught us not only how to live with Him, but also how to die with Him, and live the life that has been crucified with Christ, and is alive for evermore.

Not for His own glory did Christ live and die, but for us and for His Father. He died for us that we might live; yes, He died for us that we might die, and then live the crucified life and the life that is dead to self and sin.

Only through His dying can we truly die. We never can crucify ourselves, but we can be crucified with Christ, and say, “Nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, and the life that I now live in the flesh, I live not unto myself, but unto Him that died for me and rose again.”

Thus let us learn to die, and thus let us live, and someday we shall know the meaning of these mighty words:

“He died for me that I might die
To Satan, self, and sin;
Oh death so deep, oh life so high!
Help me to enter in.”



Chapter 14 – The Law of Sacrifice

“If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.” Matt. 16:24.

Here lies the great difference between the world’s Gospel and the Lord’s Gospel. The world says, when it bids you goodbye, “Take care of yourself.” The Lord says, “Let yourself go, and live for others and the glory of God.” The world says, “Have a good time. Look out for number one.”

The man that lets go gets all, and the man who holds fast loses what he has, and the Lord’s words come true, “Whosoever shall save his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life for My sake shall find it.”

The law of sacrifice is the greatest law in earth and heaven. It is written in every department of nature. We tread on the skeletons of thousands of generations that have lived and died that we might live. The very heart of the earth itself is the wreck of ages and the buried life of former generations. All nature dies and lives again, and each new development is a higher and larger life built on the ruins of the former. A grain of wheat must fall into the ground and die, or else be a shrivelled seed, but as it dies it lives and multiplies and grows into the beautiful spring, the golden autumn and the multiplied sheaves.

And so it is in the higher world as you rise from the natural to the spiritual. Everything that is selfish is limited by its selfishness. The river that ceases to run becomes a stagnant pool, but as it flows it grows fresher, richer, fuller.

If you turn your natural eye upon yourself, you cannot see anything. It is as you look out that the vision of the world bursts upon you. The very law of life is love, caring for others by giving away and letting go. It is self-destruction to be selfish.

The law of sacrifice is the law of God. God, who lived in supreme self-sufficiency as the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, gave Himself. God’s glory was in giving Himself, and so He gave Himself in creation, in the beauty of the universe, so formed that every possible sort of happiness could come according to a natural law.

God gave Himself in Jesus Christ. “God so loved the world that He gave.” He gave His best, gave His all, gave His only begotten Son. The law of God is sacrifice. He so loved that He gave. It is the law of Christ Himself. He came through God’s sacrifice, and He came to sacrifice. He laid His honors down, left the society of heaven for a generation, and lived with creatures farther beneath Him than the groveling worm is beneath man. He made Himself one of us, and became a brother of this fallen race. Christ was always yielding and letting go, always holding back His power and not using it. He was always being subject to the will of the men beneath Him, until at last they nailed Him to the cross. His whole life was a continual refusing of Himself, carrying our burdens and sharing our sorrows. And so sacrifice is the law of Christ, “Bear ye one another’s burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ.” The law of Christ is the bearing of others’ burdens, the sharing of others’ griefs, sacrificing yourself for another.

It is the law of Christianity. It is the law of the saint. It is the only way to be saved. From the beginning it has always been so. It was so on Mount Moriah, where Abraham, the father of the faithful, gave up his only child, the child of promise. All along the way was marked by blood and sacrifice.

Not only did Abraham give up Isaac, but Isaac gave up his life, and all through his life he laid himself down for others. We know how Jacob served for his wife, and then did not get the one of his choice. His was a suffering life, a passive life, a patient life.

And so Joseph died to his circumstances. Because he was to rise so high he must go down as low; down not only into banishment, but into shameful imprisonment and almost into death. When Joseph was out of sight, and all God’s promises concerning him seemed lost, and his prospects seemed hopeless, then God picked him up and set him on the world’s throne.

Moses had to be a fugitive. Moses had to try and then fail, and for forty years God had to teach him and train him; and when at last Moses was out of sight, God gave him his desire. At the very last moment, Moses had to let go the prospect of entering the Promised Land.

The Master’s last message to Peter was, “When thou wast young thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest; but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands and another shalt gird thee, and carry whither thou wouldest not. This spake He, signifying by what death he should glorify God.” And Jesus sent him to a life of crucifixion, to be yielded, submissive, surrendered and led about by others against his natural choice, till at last he should be crucified with downward head upon his Master’s cross.

It is so easy to talk about this. The longer I live, the longer I know myself and friends, the more thoroughly I am satisfied that this is the great secret of failure in our Christian life. We go a little way with Jesus, but we stop at Gethsemane and Calvary. They followed Him in His ministry in Galilee. The Sermon on the Mount was splendid morality. They loved the feeding of the five thousand, and said, “What a blessed King He would be!” They would not have to work as they used to do. But when He talked about Calvary and the cross, for them as well as for Him, and how they must go with Him all the way, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can bear it?” And a few days after you could count them on your fingers. They were not willing to go to the cross.

I am sure this is where multitudes have stopped short. They have said “yes” to self and “no” to God, instead of “no” to self and “yes” to God. Oh, it is so much easier to talk than to live! A writer has said that there are three baptisms to be baptized with. First, the baptism of repentance, when we turn from sin to God. Second, the baptism of the Holy Ghost, when we receive the Holy Spirit to live in us. Third, the baptism into death, after the Holy Spirit comes in. The Holy Spirit makes your heart His home, and then you have to go with Christ into His own dying. “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me.” And so He said about Himself, “I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened until it be accomplished.” He was going out into deeper death, and His heart was all pent up with it, until He went down into Gethsemane, down to Joseph’s tomb, down into Hades and passed through the regions of the dead and opened first the gates of heaven. That is what Jesus saw before Him after He was baptized on the banks of the Jordan.

Oh ye, who have received the baptism of the Holy Ghost, it is you who have to go down into His death. I know that in a sense we take all that by faith when we consecrate ourselves to Christ, and we count it all real, and God counts it all real too; but now we have to go through it step by step. I know God treats us as though it was accomplished and we were sitting yonder on the throne. But we must go through the narrow passage and the secret place of the stairs. There must be no trifling here. You may count it all done by faith, but step by step it must be written on the records of your heart.

Now, what does all this mean in our practical life? First, it is dying to self-will. After you consecrate yourself to God, then will come the tug of war, and tomorrow morning you will have the battle of your life. Just because you have given up your will the devil will want you to take it back. He will try to show you how unreasonable it is, how right it is that you should have your way. It will be a life-or-death struggle, perhaps, for days. Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days. The devil tried to have Him choose His own way, but He stood the test. He let His own will go. “I came not to do Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me.”

God could make Him a leader because He had been led. No man can govern until he has been governed. If God is going to make anything of you, you must let your will go into His hands. You will find a good many tests after the first surrender, but these are just opportunities for allowing the work to be done.

Then comes self-indulgence, doing a thing because you like to do it. No man has a right to do a thing because he enjoys it. I have no right to take my dinner merely because I like it. This makes me a beast. I take it because it nourishes me. Doing things because they please you, seeking your own interest, is wrong. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.” We have no divine warrant to seek ourselves in anything. Seek God, and God will seek your good. Take care of the things of God and He will take care of you. “Look not any man on his own things, but every
man also on the things of others.”

Again, there is self-complacency, dwelling on the work that you have done. How easy, after performing some service or gaining some victory, to think, “How good!” How quickly this runs into vainglory! How many are more interested in what people think and say of them than of what they are themselves!

In the work of God there is nothing we need so much to guard against as vanity. The seraphim covered their faces with their wings; they covered their feet with their wings. They covered their faces because they did not want to see their beauty, and their feet because they did not want to see their service, nor did they wish that any one else should see them. They used only two to fly. Take care how you put temptation in another’s way. It is all right to encourage workers with a “God bless you.” But don’t praise. God does not say, How beautiful! how eloquent! how lovely! how splendid! That is putting on a human head the crown that belongs to Jesus. We have no more right to take Christ’s honors here than we have to sit on His throne and let angels worship us. We have to be careful when God uses us to bless human souls.

Philip, as soon as he led the eunuch to Jesus, got out of the eunuch’s way. There are subtle spells that come between man and man, and between woman and woman, and between man and woman. They seem sweet and right, but you need much of the Holy Ghost to keep your spirit pure. I am not talking here of sinful love. Surely, it is not needful to speak of that. I am thinking of a far more subtle and refined spell, which is at once dishonoring to God and dangerous to you. God keep us from every service, and every friendship, and every thought that is not in the Holy Ghost and not to the honor of Jesus alone.

Then there is self-confidence, that which feels its strength, spiritual or mental self-righteousness, power to be good or do good. We must lay all that aside and realize our utter nothingness. There is the self-life of sensitiveness, susceptibility to be wounded. There is selfish affection, wanting people to love you because you like to be loved. Divine love loves that it may bless and do good. You ought to love others, not because it pleases you but because it blesses them. Paul could say, “I am glad to spend and be spent for your sakes; notwithstanding the more earnestly I love you, the less I be loved.” He does not say I will help you as long as you love your tears. You are weeping because you say I will help you as long as you love me. No, I gladly spend my last drop of blood to bless you at any cost, even when I know you do not appreciate me the least bit. That is what is the matter with you. People hurt you; they do not appreciate you. Well, spend and be spent all the more when you are the less loved.

Time would fail to tell of selfish desires, covetousness, selfish motives, selfish possessions, our property, our children, and they give us loads of trouble, and care, and worry, just because we insist on owning them. There are selfish sorrows. There is nothing more selfish than the tears we often shed. When God saw Israel weeping, He was angry, and said, “You have polluted My altar with your tears.” You are weeping because you have not better bread. You are weeping because something else is dearer to you than God. You are weeping because you are not pleased or gratified.

Even our sacrifices and self-denials may be selfish. Yes, our sanctifications may be selfish. A sarcastic friend of mine used to say when he heard people testifying about their sinlessness, “Poor old soul, she committed the greatest sin of her life, she foretold the biggest lie.” Self can get up and pray, and sit down and say, “What a lovely prayer!” Self can preach a sermon and save souls and go home, pat itself on the back and say, or let the devil say through him, “You did it splendidly; what a useful man you are!” Self can be burned to death and be proud of its fortitude. Yes, we can have religious selfishness as well as carnal selfishness.

How can we get rid of this? Well, above everything else, we must see the reality of the thing, we must see its danger, we must see that it is sin. We must look at it frankly and choose that it shall go. The worst is that it deceives us. It says, “How that fits somebody else, not me.” God means you. Pass sentence of death upon it, or else it will pass sentence on you. You may keep it as long as you like. It is like the lovely little serpent with little spots on it like jewels. Ah, at the last, how it stings!

May God show us everything in us that will not stand the searching flames. Above everything, do not let us have a larger Gospel than we have a life. Having passed sentence of death upon ourselves, then let us take Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit to do the work. Don’t try to fight it yourself. And then, when the test time comes, and God leads you out to meet it, BE TRUE. The test will come, but when the battle comes do not defend yourself, but say, “Lord let me die.” Perhaps some one will try to provoke you. Perhaps some one will try to praise you. Just say again, “Lord, let me die.” The Holy Spirit is able to take everything we dare to give, and give everything we dare to take. Shall we dare to take Him for the death of our subtlest foe, and truly pray:

O Jesus, slay the self in me
By Thy consuming breath;
Show me Thy heart, Thy wounds,
Thy shame, And love my soul to death.
When the Shekinah flame came down,
E’en Moses could not stay;
So let Thy glory fill my heart,
And self for ever slay.”



Chapter 15 – Crucified with Christ

“Let us also go, that we may die with Him.” John 11: 16.

This was an outburst of impetuous love from the heart of Thomas. The disciples had been vainly endeavoring to dissuade the Master from going back to Judea, because of the malignant hate which the resurrection of Lazarus had awakened on the part of His enemies, and the certainty of such hate being renewed in a dangerous form if He should return. “Master,” they said, “the Jews of late sought to stone Thee, and goest Thou thither again?” But when Thomas saw that persuasions did not avail, and that the Lord was certainly going back to face His enemies, he cried in an impulse of desperation and devotion, “Let us also go, that we may die with Him.” This, does not refer to the death of Lazarus, but to the certain death which Jesus would incur should He return to the midst of His infuriated foes. It was the cry of a devoted soldier ready to follow his leader in the “forlorn hope,” even into the jaws of danger and of death.

Thomas was wiser than he knew in the words he uttered. It is true he and his fellow-disciples did not immediately share their Master’s fate, for, as Christ afterwards said to Peter, “Whither I go, thou canst not follow Me now, but thou shalt follow Me afterwards.”

But there was a deep and sacred sense in which they were to die with Him, even before the literal death which persecution and martyrdom were to bring to them. And there is a real and solemn sense in which these words are true of every disciple of Jesus Christ. For the death of our blessed Lord is not only the source of our salvation, but it is also a pattern of our life, and the secret of our crucifixion . . . “crucified with Christ.”

There is an important sense in which we may die with Christ to our past life of sin. The first chapter in the believer’s life is justification. This is founded upon the death of the Lord Jesus Christ, and it comes to us through the faith that reckons His death as ours, “For in that He died, He died unto sin once. . . . Likewise reckon ye yourselves also to be dead unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. . . . For he that is dead is freed from sin,” or, as it literally means, “is justified from sin.”

When God saves a man, He does not merely overlook his sin in kind and gracious clemency, but He settles for it completely and finally. And when He justifies a sinner, He not only overlooks his fault, but He declares him righteous, and puts him in the same position as if he had never sinned; or, rather, perhaps, as if he had been punished for his sin, and had thus satisfied all the demands of justice and law.

When Jesus Christ hung upon the Cross of Calvary He suffered as the Substitute of every sinner who should afterward believe in Him. Hidden somewhere in His wounded side we were there, and God counts it as if it were our death and our execution. This was the day of judgment for Christ and the believer. Every demand of justice was satisfied, every penalty executed, every debt paid. With Him we died to sin, and God recognizes us as if we had actually passed out of existence. The criminal was executed, and buried, and as a dead man the law can never touch him again.

But now, through Christ’s resurrection we have come into a new life; and that life is utterly detached from the old sinful life. God recognizes us as though we were not the same persons who sinned, but new creatures, born out of heaven and standing in the same position before Him as Jesus Christ occupies. Thus the death of Christ, when reckoned ours, puts us in the place where we are justified and “accepted in the Beloved.”

Surely, this is a glorious place for a guilty, hell-deserving man. O sinner, hasten to claim the blessed privilege of reckoning yourself to be “dead indeed unto sin” through Him. “Let us go, that we may die with Him,” and then let us rise to live for Him who died.

There is a sense in which we may die with Him to the power of sin in our hearts and lives; for when Christ died on Calvary He died for our sinful nature. “God, sending His own Son, in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of God might be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit.” “He was made sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.”

These passages undoubtedly teach that the death of Jesus Christ was God’s provision for our sanctification, just as much as for our justification, and that He bare on the Cross of Calvary not only our guilt and liability to punishment, but our sinful nature, with all the roots and springs of corruption which we inherited from a fallen head. It is our privilege, therefore, to reckon, not only that our past life of sin was expiated on the Cross, but that the principle of sin and the whole sinful man was crucified when Jesus died. It is our privilege, therefore, to lay that over upon Him, to reckon it crucified with Him, to refuse to recognize it any longer as having a right to control us, to repudiate it, and take our new life from His resurrection and reckon ourselves alive unto God through Jesus Christ. The secret of this is the reckoning of faith, and the deepest snare we shall meet in this life is the assault of Satan upon our faith by an appeal to our feelings. He will try to make you think, even after you have made a full surrender and renunciation of yourself to Him, that there is really no change, that your old sinful self is still there in all its power, and that this reckoning is a fiction and a falsehood. If you once listen to him and take counsel of your own heart, you will surely fall, but, if you refuse to believe him and hold fast to your reckoning, God will make it real. In the spiritual life the very principle of victory is faith. What you dare to claim and hold fast, God will make it true in your experience, and if you falter you shall always fall.

But we must enter into Christ’s death moment by moment, in the actual living out of this transaction of faith. There is a point where we definitely yield and accept Him. But then it must be translated into all the details of our actual life, as He meets us in His providence and brings us face to face with the very experiences which introduce us into actual fellowship with his earthly life, and enable us to live it over again with Him. It is there we shall find the value and help of this blessed oneness with the Crucified. We shall not have gone very far till we shall find that our strength and goodness have quite failed us; and how comforting it is to realize at that moment that He does not expect from us either strength or goodness, but only to ignore our strength and goodness, and take Him instead as our all-sufficiency. Our business is to die with Him to all our own resources, and then to receive His fulness, “grace for grace.” We shall learn gradually that we are no good in ourselves, and we shall come to know it without being discouraged. He has known it all the time, and He has simply been bringing us fully to find it out. We shall come at last to begin every battle with a surrender to Him and end it with a song, “Thanks be unto God that always leadeth us in triumph through Christ Jesus.”

Again, we shall often come to the place where our old positive nature and our self-asserting will springs to the front, and we find our struggles unavailing to subdue that will; and then again we shall learn with infinite joy that it is His business to subdue that will; that we have but to hand it over to Him, to the end that His love may chloroform it to death and “work in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure.”

Thus as we come into the conflict of fierce temptation we shall find Him in the front, and His reassuring voice will say to us, “Stand still and see the salvation of God. The battle is not yours, but God’s.” If we are wronged by injustice, misunderstanding, or misrepresentation we shall find that it is His wrong first, not ours, and we shall hear Him say to our persecutors and enemies, “Why persecutest thou Me?” and it will be such rest to “commit the keeping of our souls to Him in well-doing as unto a faithful Creator,” and to die with Him even as He suffered and died, “as a lamb led to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb.”

So also, when trouble and calamity confront us, instead of rushing impetuously for the help of man, or seeking some expedient of self-effort, we shall find ourselves falling into His hands, and recognizing that our trial is His first and ours only in fellowship with Him.

How beautiful the incident at Capernaum, where poor Peter suddenly found himself confronted with the demand of the Roman officers for their taxes, and embarrassed at his inability to pay the demand. How tenderly we are told that the Lord “prevented him,” that is, anticipated his trouble, and even before Peter had said a word about it provided relief by sending him down to the sea to catch a fish with the coin of gold in its mouth. But with exquisite tact He added, “That take, and pay for Me and thee.” “It isn’t your tax only, Peter, but Mine first. I am bearing the heavy end of the burden and you are suffering with Me.”

If we can thus recognize the trials of life as partnership with His sufferings and always put Him first, the things that have humiliated us, harassed us, and often become to us temptations to unbelief and sin will be changed from weights to wings, and will become blessed occasions for closer intimacy with our Lord, and nobler triumphs in His name.

Shall we thus die with Him? Shall we follow Him forth along that pathway of loneliness, shame, and sorrow, and at every step realize a closer fellowship with Him? And should the coming days bring to us a full rehearsal of all the story of His life and sorrow, let us never for a moment meet it alone, but always with Him. Should our pathway lie down the slopes of Olivet, and even lead us into the somber shades of Gethsemane, let us remember that He is only saying to us, “What, could ye not watch with Me one hour?”

“Ye are they that have continued with Me in My temptations, and I appoint unto you a kingdom as My Father hath appointed unto Me.”

Should we go forth in these coming days to meet Him in the reproach and shame of the judgment hall, and the betrayal of some Judas, or even, harder still, the denial of some fondly loved Peter, oh, let us take Him with us through it all, and, meeting it in His Spirit, sweetly realize that we are simply dying with Him. And as the shadows deepen into the darkness of that cross, where for Him earth’s sun ceased to shine, earth’s friends forsook Him and fled, and even His Father’s face for a little while was clouded and turned away, oh, let us remember Him who, “for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame”:

“Crucified with Christ, my Savior,
To the world and self and sin,
To the death-born life of Jesus
I am sweetly entering in.
In His fellowship of suffering,
To His death conformed to be,
I am going with my Savior
All the way to Calvary.

‘Tis not hard to die with Jesus,
When His risen life we know.
‘Tis not hard to share his suff’rings,
When our hearts with joy o’erflow.
In His resurrection power
He has come to dwell in me,
And my heart is gladly going
All the way to Calvary.”



Chapter 16 – The Power of His Resurrection

“If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God.” Col. 3:1. “That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death.” Phil. 3:10.

These passages describe our attitude toward the resurrection of Christ, and the power which His resurrection is fitted to exercise upon our life and work. “If ye then be risen” — literally, “If ye then were resurrected with Christ.” There is a difference between “risen” and “resurrected.” One may rise from one level to another; but when one is resurrected, he is brought from nothing into existence, from death to life, and the transition is simply infinite.

The great objection to all the teachings of mere natural religion and human ethics is, that we are taught to rise to higher planes. The glory of the Gospel is that it does not teach us to rise, but shows us our inability to do anything good of ourselves, and, laying us in the grave in utter helplessness and nothingness, raises us up into new life, born from above and sustained from heavenly sources. Christian life is not self-improvement, but is a supernatural and divine experience.

Now, resurrection cannot come until there has been death, and just as real as the death has been, so will be the measure of resurrection life and power. Let us not fear, therefore, to die, and to die to all that we would detach ourselves from, yea, to die to ourselves. We lose nothing by letting go, and we cannot enter in till we come out. “If we be dead with Christ, we shall also live with Him.”

The passage in Colossians expresses the fact that we have already died and risen, and that we are now to take the attitude of those for whom this is an accomplished fact. The Apostle does not call upon us to die again with Christ and rise with Him anew, but he calls upon us to recognize the fact that we have done this, and now are expected to live on a corresponding plane. He tells them later in the passage, “For ye have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God.”

In the sixth chapter of Romans this thought is much more fully worked out. “As many of us as were baptized into Christ,” the Apostle says, “were baptized into His death. Therefore we have been buried with Him by baptism into death; that like as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.” Then, to emphasize more forcibly the finality of this fact, he says, “Knowing that Christ, being raised from the dead, dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over Him; for in that He died, He died unto sin once; but in that He liveth, He liveth unto God.” Therefore, and in like manner, the Apostle bids us to “reckon ourselves dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Christ Jesus,” and to yield ourselves “unto God as those that are alive from the dead and our members as instruments of righteousness unto God.”

Now, much of the teaching of the present day would bid us yield ourselves unto God to be crucified by a constant process of dying, but the Apostle says nothing of the kind here. On the contrary, we are to yield ourselves unto God as those who have already died and are alive from the dead, recognizing the Cross as behind us; and for this very reason presenting ourselves to God, to be used for His service and glory. Have you never seen soaring in mid-heaven some bird, with mighty pinions spread upon the bosom of the air, and floating in the clear sky without a fluttering feather or apparently the movement of a muscle? It is poised in mid-air, floating yonder, far above the earth below; it does not need to rise, it has risen, and is resting in its high and glorious altitude. Very different is the movement of the little lark that springs from the ground, and, beating its wings in successive efforts, mounts up to the same aerial height to sing its morning song, and then returns again to earth. One is the attitude of rising, and the other is the attitude of “risen.”

Perhaps you say, “How can I reckon myself dead when I find so many evidences that I am still alive, and how can I reckon myself risen when I find so many things that pull me back again to my lower plane?” It is your failure to reckon and abide that drags you back. It is the recognizing of the old life as still alive that makes it to be real and keeps you from overcoming it. This is the principle which underlies the whole system of grace, that we receive according to the reckoning of our faith. The magic wand of faith will lay all the ghosts that can rise in the cemetery of your soul; and spirit of doubt will bring them up from the grave to haunt you as long as you continue to question. The only way you can truly die is by surrendering yourself to Christ and then reckoning yourself dead with Him.

Should old traits of evil reappear; should old thoughts, evil tendencies, assert themselves, and say loudly and clamorously, “We are not dead,” what then? If you recognize these things, fear them and obey them; you are sure to give them life, and they will control you and drag you back into your former state. But if you refuse to recognize them, and say, “These are Satan’s lies, I am dead indeed unto sin, these do not belong to me, but are the children of the devil, I therefore repudiate them and rise above them” — then God will detach you from them and make them to be really dead. You will find they were no part of you, but simply temptations which Satan tried to throw over you until they seemed part of yourself. This is the true remedy for all the workings of temptation and sin. It is an awful fact that when one counts himself wicked he will become wicked.

There is a strange story written by a gifted mind, describing a man who was two men alternately. When he believed himself to be a noble character he was noble and true, and lived accordingly; but when the other ideal took possession of him he went down accordingly. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Our reckonings reflect themselves in our realities; therefore God has made this principle of faith to be the mainspring of personal righteousness and holiness, and the subtle, yet sublime, power that can lead men out of themselves into the very life of God.

Our attitude will influence our aim. People live according to their standing. The high-born child of nobility carries in his bearing and his mien the consciousness of a noble descent, and so those who have a title to a heavenly kingdom, and the consciousness of their high and heavenly rank, walk as the children of a king. The remainder of Paul’s letter is devoted to working out this most practical idea, that, because we have risen with Christ, therefore let us live accordingly.

The argument against lying is: we have put off the old man and put on the new man. We have ceased to be paupers and become princes. We have put on the new man, therefore let us put on kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering, and over all that charity, which is a perfect girdle that binds all the garments together. The best of all our robes is Christ Himself; and we are to put on Christ.

This resurrection life is intensely practical. The Apostle brings it into touch with the nearest relationship of life, the family circle, the position of masters and servants, and all the secular obligations of life. It is to affect our whole conduct and aims and lead us to walk with Him wherever we are called.

This leads us to notice the practical power there is in this glorious fact, that we have been raised up together with Christ. It has power, in the first place, to confirm our assurance of salvation, because the resurrection of Christ was the guarantee that the ransom price was paid and the work of atonement complete. When He came forth triumphant from the tomb, it was evident to the universe that the purpose for which He went there was fulfilled, the work He undertook satisfactorily done, and the Father was satisfied with His finished atonement. Therefore, faith can rest upon His resurrection as an everlasting foundation, and say, “Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea, rather, that is risen again.”

Again, the resurrection of Christ is the power that sanctifies us. It enables us to count our old life and our former self annihilated, so that we are no longer the same in the eyes of God, or of ourselves; and we may with confidence repudiate ourselves, and refuse either to obey or fear our former evil nature. The risen Christ Himself comes to dwell within us, and become in us the power of our new life and victorious obedience. It is not merely the fact of the resurrection, but the fellowship of the Risen One that brings us our victory and our power. We have learned the meaning of the sublime paradox, “I have been crucified with Christ. Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” This is the only true and lasting sanctification, the indwelling life of Christ, the Risen One, in the believing and obedient soul.

Christ’s resurrection has a mighty power to energize our faith and encourage us to claim God’s answers to our prayers, and ask difficult things from God. What can be too difficult or impossible after the open grave and the stone rolled away? God is trying to teach us “the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe, “according to His mighty power which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and set Him at His own right hand.” Christ’s resurrection is the pledge of all we can ask for, and if we pray in “the power of His resurrection,” we will take much more than we have been doing.

The resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ is the secret of power for service. The testimony of His resurrection is always peculiarly used by the Holy Spirit as the power of God unto the salvation of men. It was the chief theme of the ministry of the early apostles. They were always preaching of Jesus and the Resurrection. It gives a peculiar attractiveness to Christian life and work. Many Christians look as gloomy as if they were going to their own funerals. We heard not long ago of a little girl who met some very sad-looking people on the road, and she said, “Mother, those are Christians, aren’t they?” And when the mother asked her why she thought so, she said, “They look so unhappy.”

This is the type of Christianity that comes from the cloister and the crucifix. This is not the Easter type, and certainly it is not the higher type. The religion of Jesus should be as bright as the blossoms of the spring, the songs of the warbling birds, and the springing pulses of reviving nature. Our Lord met the women on that bright morning with the cheering message, “All hail,” and so He would meet each one of us on the threshold of our Christian life, and bid us go forth with the joy of our Lord as our strength. This joy must spring from the resurrection and be maintained by life in the heavenlies with its ascended Lord. This is the message that a sad and sinful world needs today. Its motto must not be the Ecce homo of the judgment hall, but the glad All hail! of the Easter dawn. The more of the indwelling Christ and the resurrection life there is in Christian work, the more will be its living power to attract, satisfy, and save the world.

There is power in Christ’s resurrection to enable us to meet the hardest places in life and endure its bitterest trials. And so we read in Philippians that the power of His resurrection is to bring us into the knowledge of the fellowship of His sufferings, and make us conformable unto His death. We go into the resurrection life that we may be strong enough to suffer with Him and for Him.

There is a very remarkable passage in Isaiah which tells us of those that “mount up with wings as eagles”; but immediately afterwards we find the same persons coming down to the ordinary walks of life, “to run and not be weary, to walk and not faint.” It would seem as if the mounting up was just intended to fit them for the running and walking, and that the higher experiences of grace and glory were designed to enable them to tread the lower levels of toil and trial.

It is in keeping with this that the Apostle speaks of glorying in tribulation. “Glory” expresses the highest attitude of the soul, and “tribulation” the deepest degree of suffering. And so it would teach us that when we come to the deepest and lowest place we must meet it in the highest and most heavenly spirit. This is going down from the Mount of Transfiguration to meet the demoniac in the plain below, and cast out the power of Satan from a suffering world. Yes, these are the sufferings of Christ. The power of His resurrection is designed to enable us to rise to all the heights of His glorious life, and like Him go forth to reflect our blessing upon the lives of others, and find a sweeter joy in the ministrations of holy love than in the ecstasies of divine communion.

THE END



Preface

The first half of this little volume has been issued in many successive editions as a series of tracts on the Gospel of Healing. The testimony of many persons in various directions that they have been greatly blessed of God, and the desire often expressed to have them in permanent form, has induced the author to reissue them in book form, with the addition of several fresh chapters. It is hoped this simple volume may now be found to be a compact and more useful channel of Scriptural instruction upon this important subject. The views expressed have been carefully weighed in the balance of the Divine Word, and confirmed by much careful experience and observation.

The importance of this subject, and the emphatic way in which God’s Holy Spirit is pressing it upon the attention of His people, demands for it the most careful and thoroughly Scriptural study. Effectual faith can only come through thorough conviction.

In spite of the cold and conservative, and sometimes scornful, unbelief of many, this doctrine is becoming one of the touchstones of character and spiritual life in all the churches, and revolutionizing, by a deep, quiet, and Divine movement, the whole Christian life of thousands. It has a profound bearing upon the spiritual life. No one can truly receive it without being a holier and more useful Christian. We believe it is to be one of the most mighty forces in the next missionary movement. We should not be surprised if it should have an important place in the greatest spiritual awakening that is yet to visit the churches; and we cannot question that it is intimately connected with the hope and nearness of our Lord’s second coming. It is most important that it should be ever held in its true place in relation to the other parts of the Gospel. It is not the whole Gospel, nor the chief part of it, but it is a part, and in its due subordination to the whole, it will prove, like the Gospel itself, the power of God unto everyone that believeth.



Chapter 2 – Practical Directions

We have already considered the Scriptural grounds of the doctrine of healing by faith in God. The practical question next arises: How can one who fully believes in the doctrine receive the blessing and appropriate the healing?

Be fully persuaded of THE WORD OF GOD in this matter.

This is the only sure foundation of rational and Scriptural faith. Your faith must rest on the great principles and promises of the Bible, or it never can stand the testing of oppositions and trials which are sure to come. You must be sure that this is part of the Gospel and the redemption of Christ that all the teachings and reasonings of the best of men could not shake you. Most of the practical failures of faith in this matter result from defective or doubtful convictions of the Divine Word.

The writer may be permitted to mention the case of a lady who had fully embraced this truth and accepted Christ as her Healer. She was immediately strengthened very much both in spirit and body, and her overflowing heart was only too glad to tell the good news to all her friends. Among others, she met her pastor and told him of her faith and blessing. To her surprise, he immediately objected to any such views, warned her against this new fanaticism, and told her that these promises on which she was resting were not for us; but only for the Apostles and the Apostolic age. She listened, questioned, yielded, and abandoned her confidence. In less than one month, when the writer saw her again, she had sunk to such depression that she scarcely knew whether she even believed the Bible or not. If those promises were for the Apostles, she argued, why might not all the other promises of the Bible also be for them only? She was invited to spend a season in examining the teaching of the Word of God. The promises of healing from Exodus to James were carefully compared and every question calmly weighed, until the truth became so manifest, and its evidence so overwhelming, that she could only say, “I know it is here, and I know it is true, if all the world should deny it.” Then she knelt and asked the Lord’s forgiveness for her weakness and unbelief, renewed her solemn profession of faith and consecration, and claimed anew the promise of healing and the baptism of the Holy Spirit. From that day she has been restored and blessed with all spiritual blessings; until the very pastor who caused her to stumble has been forced to own that this is the finger of God. But the starting-point of all her blessing was the moment when she fully accepted and rested in the Word of God.

Be fully assured of the WILL OF GOD TO HEAL YOU.

Most persons are ready enough to admit the power of Christ to heal. The devil himself admits this. True faith implies equal confidence in the willingness of God to answer this prayer of faith. Any doubt on this point will surely paralyze our prayer for definite healing. If there be any question of this, there can be no certainty in our expectation. A mere vague trust in the possible acceptance of our prayer is not strong enough to grapple with the forces of disease and death. The prayer for healing, “if it be His will,” carries with it no claim for which Satan will quit his hold. This is a matter about which we ought to know His will before we ask, and then will and claim it because it is His will. Has He given us any means by which we may know His will? Most assuredly. If the Lord Jesus has purchased it for us in His redemption, it must be God’s will for us to have it, for Christ’s whole redeeming work was simply the executing of the Father’s will. If Jesus has promised it to us; it must be His will that we should receive it for how can we know His will but by His word? Nay, more, if Jesus has bequeathed it to us in the New Testament, which is simply HIS LAST WILL, then it is simply one of the bequests of our Brother’s will, and all questions of will should end. The Word of God is forevermore the standard of His will, and that word “has declared immutably that it is God’s greatest desire and unalterable principle of action and will to render to every man according as he will believe, and especially to save all who will receive Christ by faith, and to heal all who will receive it by similar faith. No one thinks of asking for forgiveness “if the Lord will.” Nor should we throw any stronger doubt on His promise of physical redemption. Both are freely offered to every trusting heart that will accept them.

A very striking case recently occurred to the writer’s observation. A lady, quite prominent in Christian work, had been prayed with and anointed for healing. She returned in a few weeks saying that she was no better. She was asked if she had believed fully. “Yes,” she replied, “I believed that I should be healed if it was His good pleasure, and if not, I am willing to have it otherwise.” “But,” was the reply, “may we not know God’s pleasure in this matter from His own word, and ask with the full expectation of the blessing? Indeed, ought we to ask anything of God until we have reason to believe that it is His will? Is not His word the intimation of His will, and, after He hath so fully promised it, is it not a vexation and a mockery to imply a doubt of His willingness?” She went away, and the very next morning she claimed the promise. She told the Lord that now she not only believed that He could, but would, and did remove the trouble. In less than half an hour it had wholly and visibly disappeared–and it was an external tumor of considerable size, about which there could be no imagination or mistake.

There is much subtle unbelief often in the prayer, “Thy will be done.” That blessed petition really expresses the highest measure of Divine love and blessing. No kinder thing can come to us than that will. And yet we often ask it as if it was the iron hand of a cruel despot, and an inexorable destiny.

Be careful that you are yourself RIGHT WITH GOD.

If your sickness has come to you on account of any sinful cause, be sure that you thoroughly repent of and confess your sins, and make full restitution as far as in your power. If it has been a discipline designed to separate you from some evil, at once present yourself to God in frank self-judgment and consecration, and claim from Him the grace to sanctify you and keep you holy. An impure heart is a constant fountain of disease. A sanctified spirit is in itself as wholesome as it is holy. At the same time do not let Satan paralyze your faith by throwing you back on your unworthiness, and telling you that you are not good enough to claim this.

We never can deserve any of God’s mercies. The only plea is the name, merits, and righteousness of Christ. But we can renounce known sin, we can walk so as to please God. We can judge in ourselves, and put away all that God shows us as wrong. The moment we do this we are forgiven. “If we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged.” “If we confess our sins; He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Do not wait to feel forgiveness or joy, but let your will be wholly turned to God, and believe at once that you are accepted, and then draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having your heart sprinkled from an evil conscience, and your body washed with pure water.

It is quite vain for us to try to exercise faith for ourselves or others in the face of willful transgression and in defiance of the chastening which God has meant we shall respect and yield to. But, when we receive His correction; and to turn to Him with humble and obedient hearts, He will graciously remove the hand of pain, and make the touch of healing the token of His forgiving love. “The prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins they shall be forgiven him. Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed.”

Often our sickness is but a moral malady contracted by our getting on Satan’s territory. We cannot be healed until we get out of the forbidden place, and stand again on holy ground. So that this question of our personal state, while not a condition of healing, is a very important element in it. The great purpose of God in all His dealings with us is our highest welfare, and our spiritual soundness. To the suffering Christian, therefore; there is no better counsel than the old exhortation, “Let us search and try our ways, and turn again unto the Lord. He doth not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men. The Lord is good to those that wait for Him, to the soul that seeketh Him.”

The writer would illustrate this by again referring to an actual incident: A member of his own family was suddenly attacked with violent and dangerous illness. It was a little child, so young as to make it certain that it could not be on account of any fault or sin of its own. Amid violent convulsions all human remedies were quickly dispensed with, and the case presented to God in prayer and anointing. Immediate relief was given, but the trouble was not wholly removed, and again that night a very threatening relapse occurred, and the prayer of faith seemed met by a dreadful cloud of hindrance. At once it became deeply impressed upon his heart that something was seriously wrong on the part of some member of the family. Earnest search was made, and at length it was found to be indeed so. One person had greatly sinned and covered it. But now a deep and thorough confession was made, and the wrong solemnly made right in God’s sight, and His forgiveness sought and claimed. Then all the burden rolled away, and the innocent sufferer was instantly healed, and the next morning rose with the most marvelous health and buoyancy, and has not been seriously ill since.

Having become fully persuaded of the Word of God, the Will of God, and your own personal acceptance with God, NOW COMMIT YOUR BODY TO HIM AND CLAIM HIS PROMISE OF HEALING in the name of Jesus by simple faith.

Do not merely ask for it, but humbly and firmly claim it as His covenant pledge as your inheritance, as a purchased redemption right, as something already fully offered you in the Gospel, and waiting only your acceptance to make good your possession. There is a great difference between asking and claiming, between wanting and taking. You must take Christ as your Healer–not as an experiment, not as a future, perhaps, but as a present reality. You must believe that He does now, according to His promise, touch your life with His Almighty Hand, and quicken the fountains of your being with His strength. Do not merely believe that He will do so, but claim and believe that He does touch you now, and begin the work of healing in your body. And go forth counting it done and acknowledging and praising Him for it.

It is a good thing to prepare for this solemn act of committal and appropriating faith. It ought to be a very deliberate and final step, and in the nature of things it cannot be repeated. Like the marriage ceremony, it is the signalizing and sealing of a great transaction, and depends for its value upon the reality of the union which it seals. Before we take this step we ought to weigh every question thoroughly and then regard them as forever settled, and then step out solemnly, definitely, irrevocably on new ground, on God’s promise, with the deep conviction that it is for ever. This gives great strength and rest to the heart, and closes the door against a thousand doubts and temptations. From that moment doubt should be regarded as absolutely out of the question, and even the very thought of retreating or resorting to old means inadmissible.

Of course, such a person will at once abandon all remedies and medical treatment. God has become the Physician, and He will not give His glory to another. God has healed, and all human attempts at helping would imply a doubt of the reality of the healing. The more entirely this act of faith can be a complete committal, the more power will it have. If you have any question about your faith for this, make it a special matter of preparation and prayer. Ask God to give you special faith for this act. All our graces must come from Him, and faith among the rest. We have nothing of our own, and even our very faith is but the grace of Christ Himself within us. We can exercise it, and thus far our responsibility extends; but He must impart it, and we simply put it on and wear it as from Him. And this makes the exercise of strong faith a very simple and blessed possibility.

Jesus does not say to us, Have great faith yourselves. But He does say to us, Have the faith of God. That is better. God’s faith is all sufficient, and we can have and use it. We can take Christ for our faith as we took Him for our justification, for our victories over temptation, for our sanctification. We may thus sweetly rest in the assurance that our faith has not failed to meet the demands of the promise, for it has been Christ’s own faith. We simply come in His name, and present Him as our perfect offering, our plea, our faith, our advocate, our righteousness, and our all; and we simply and utterly receive for Christ’s sake our very faith itself, nothing but simply the taking of His free gift of grace. Thus come and claim His promise; and, having done so, believe according to His word that you have received it.

ACT YOUR FAITH.

“Arise, take up thy bed, and walk.” Not to show your faith, or display your courage, but because of your faith, begin to act as one that is healed. Treat Christ as if you trusted Him, by attempting in His name and strength what would be impossible in your own; and he will not fail you if you really trust Him, and continue to act your faith consistently and courageously.

But it is most important that you should be careful that you do not do this on any one else’s faith or word. Do not rise from your bed or walk on your lame foot because somebody tells you to do so. That is not faith, but presumption. He will surely tell you to do so, but it must be as HIS LORD; and if you are walking with Him and trusting Him you shall know His voice. Your prayer, like Peter’s must be, “Lord, bid me come unto Thee on the water” and He will surely bid you, if He is to heal you; but in this great and solemn work, each of us must know and see the Lord for himself.

And then, when you do go forth to act your faith, be careful not to begin to watch the result or look at the symptoms, or see if you stand. You must ignore all symptoms, and see only Him there before you, Almighty to sustain you and save you from falling. The man who digs up his seed to see if it is growing will very soon kill it at the root. The true farmer trusts nature and lets it grow in silence. So let us trust God, willing even to see the answer buried like that seed, and dying in the dark soil of discouragement, knowing that “if it die it bringeth forth much fruit.”

BE PREPARED FOR TRIALS OF FAITH.

Do not look always for the immediate removal of the symptoms. Do not think of them. Simply ignore them and press forward, claiming the reality, at the back of and below all symptoms. Remember the health you have claimed is not your own natural strength, but the life of Jesus manifested in your mortal flesh, and therefore the old natural life may still be encompassed with many infirmities, but at the back of it, beside it, and over against it, is the all-sufficient life of Christ to sustain your body. “Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” But “Christ is your life;” and the life you now live in the flesh you live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved you and gave Himself for you. Do not, then, wonder if nature still will often fail you. His healing is not nature, it is grace, it is Christ, it is the bodily life of the risen Lord. It is the vital energy of the body that went up to the right hand of God; and it never faints and it never fails those who trust it.

IT IS CHRIST WHO IS YOUR LIFE; Christ’s body for your body as His Spirit was for your spirit. Therefore do not wonder if there should be trials. They come to show your need of Christ and throw you back upon Him. And to know this, and so to put on His strength in our weakness, and live in it moment by moment, is perfect healing. Then, again, trials always test and strengthen faith in proportion as it is real; it must be shown to be genuine, so that God can vindicate His reward of it before the whole universe. It is thus that God increases our faith by laying larger demands upon it, and compelling us to claim and exercise more grace. “As an eagle stirreth up her nest” and tumbles out her young in mid-air to compel them to reach out their little pinions, and train them to fly, so God often pushes us off all our own props and confidences to compel us to reach out the arms and wings of faith. But for the sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham never could have attained, as he did, to the faith of the resurrection.

But, be the symptoms what they may, we must steadily believe that at the back of all symptoms God is working out His own great restoration. “For which cause we faint not, but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.”

USE YOUR NEW STRENGTH AND HEALTH FOR GOD, and be careful to obey
the will of the Master.

This Christ-given strength is a very sacred thing. It is the resurrection Life of Christ in us. And it must be spent as He Himself would spend it. It cannot be wasted on sin and selfishness; it must be given to God, “a living sacrifice.” The strength will fail where it is devoted to the world, and sin will always bring bodily chastisement. We may, ordinarily, expect to be in health and prosper even as our soul prospers.

Nor is it enough for us to use it for ourselves; we must testify of it to others. We must tell it to the world. We must be fearless and faithful witnesses to the Gospel of full redemption. Often the testimony will have to be given under the most trying circumstances to persons who will most proudly scorn it. But the Master commands, and the church needs, that the whole counsel of God shall be declared.

And the world needs this Gospel of healing. The pagan nations need it as an evidence of Christianity. Infidelity needs it as an answer to its materialism. The great work of Foreign Missions needs it as an introduction to the Gospel among the heathen. The next great missionary movement will and must incorporate this mighty truth. And this truth will be to the work of spreading the Gospel infinitely more than the work of medical missions has been in the past.

This is not a faith that we can hold for ourselves. It is a great and solemn trust, and we who have received it must unite to use it for the glory of God, for a witness to the truth and for the spread of the Gospel, as the tongues of Pentecost were used in the ancient days of Christianity. These wonderful manifestations of the power of God which we are beginning to see, are significant signals of the end. They are the forerunners of the Great Appearing. As they marked the period of his presence on earth so they attend His return. And, they bid us prepare in solemn earnest for his Advent.

With our eyes no longer on the grave, but on the opening heavens, and our hearts feeling already some of the pulses of that resurrection life, it is ours to watch and work as none others can; not sparing ourselves in anxious self-care, but working in His great might, in season and out of season, and finding it true that “He that saveth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for Christ’s sake and the Gospel’s shall keep it unto life eternal.”

Thus let us claim, and keep and consecrate this great gift of the Gospel and the grace of God. And now “The very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is He that calleth you, who also will do it.”



Chapter 3 – Popular Objections

We will now refer to some of the most forcible objections to the glad tidings that “He that forgiveth all our iniquities,” as truly and as fully also “healeth all our diseases.”

THE AGE OF MIRACLES IS PAST: This is commonly assumed as an axiom, and almost quoted as a Bible text. In reply, let us ask, what age are we in?

There have been, and shall be, various Ages and Dispensations, viz, Paradisiacal, Antediluvian, Patriarchal, Mosaic, Christian, Millennial, Eternal. We are not in the Patriarchal or Mosaic, we are not in the Millennial, we must therefore be in the Christian. But perhaps there are two or three Christian Ages; one for Christ and His Apostles, and one for us. And yet Paul says he lived in “these last days.” He speaks of the people of his generation as those on whom “the ends of the world are come.” And Peter, in his sermon on the Day of Pentecost, claims for his day a prophesy of Joel for the latter days. We must then be in the Age of Christ and Christianity, and if that was not the Age of Miracles then what is it?

But perhaps there was to be a great gulf between the first and last periods of this Age. Perhaps it was only to begin with special manifestations of Divine Power and then shade down into sober commonplace. Why then should Joel say that the signal outpouring of the Holy Spirit should be “in the latter days,” and the special gifts of the Spirit to the handmaids and servants, and the preternatural signs and wonders both in Earth and Heaven should be specially “before the coming of that great and terrible day of the Lord,” that is, toward the close of the Christian Age, and prior to the Advent? Why also should Paul so strongly insist, in 1 Cor. 12, that the Church of Christ is one body, not two, and that the gifts of every part belong to the whole? If there be an essential difference between the Apostolic and later Age, then the Church is not one body but two; then the gifts of those members do not flow into our members; then the glorious figure and powerful reasoning of that chapter are false and delusive. If we are the same body, we have the same life and power.

What made the Apostles more mighty than ordinary men? It was not their companionship with Jesus; it was the gift of the Holy Ghost. Have we not the same? And do we not exalt the men and disparage the Spirit that makes them what they were when we speak of their power as exceptional and transient? Peculiar and exceptional functions they indeed had, as the witnesses of Christ’s resurrection, and the organizers of the Church on earth; but to show to men that the miraculous gifts of the Church were not confined to them, these are specially distinguished from the Apostleship in 1 Cor. 12. They were conferred in preeminent degree on Stephen, Philip, and others who were not apostles at all, and they were committed by James to the ordinary and permanent eldership of the Church. Nay, the dear Master never contemplated or proposed any post-apostolic gulf of impotence and failure. Man’s unbelief and sin have made it. The Church’s own corruption has caused it. But He never desired it nor provided for it. Standing midway between earth and heaven, and looking down to the nineteenth century with a love as tender, and a grace as full and potential, as He exercised to the first, and speaking in the present tense, as though we were all equally near to Him who would never be separated from us, He said, “All power is Given unto Me in HEAVEN AND IN EARTH, and lo, I AM with you ALL THE DAYS, even unto the End of the AGE” (Greek). It was to be one age, not two, and His all power was never withdrawn. He was to be a perpetual AM, and to be as near at the end as at the beginning. In fact; the work we were to do was to be but the complement of His own, nay, His Own work; for Luke says, “He began to do and to teach.” He must therefore be finishing His work still. And this is just what He Himself said our work would be, “He that believeth on Me, the works that I do shall he do also (that is, they shall be Christ’s work and ours, in partnership), nor shall they be aught diminished by His seeming absence; for “greater works shall he do because I go to My Father.”

And, indeed, so long as the ancient Church retained in even limited measure the faith and holiness of the first days, the same works were uniformly found. In the second, third, and fourth centuries, fathers as famous as Irenaeus and Tertullian, bear testimony to the prevalence of many undoubted miracles of healing, and even the raising of the dead in the name of Jesus. And as late as the fifth century supernatural events, in the case of numerous well-known and living men and women, are attested by authorities as high as Procopius and Justinian, on evidence so strong that the sober editor of Mosheim declares that he who would doubt it must be ready to question all the facts of history.

The Age of Miracles is not past. The Word of God never indicated a hint of such a fact. On the contrary, they are to be among the signs of the last day; and the very adversary himself is to counterfeit them, and send forth at last the spirits of devils working miracles, into the kings of the earth. So that the only defense against the false miracles will be the true. We are in the Age of miracles, the Age of Christ, the Age which lies between two Advents, and underneath the eye of a ceaseless Divine Presence, the Age of Power, the Age which above all other ages of time should be intensely alive.

THE SAME RESULTS AS ARE CLAIMED FOR FAITH IN THE HEALING OF DISEASE ARE ALSO SAID TO FOLLOW THE PRACTICES OF SPIRITUALISM, ANIMAL MAGNETISM, CLAIRVOYANCE, ETC.

We will not deny that while some of the manifestations of Spiritualism are undoubted frauds, there are many that are unquestionably supernatural, and are produced by forces for which Physical Science has no explanation. It is no use to try to meet this terrific monster of SPIRITUALISM in which, as Joseph Cook says, is, perhaps, the great IF of our immediate future in England and America, with the hasty and shallow denial of the facts, of their explanation as tricks of legerdemain. They are often undoubtedly real and superhuman. They are “the spirits of devils working miracles,” gathering men for Armageddon. They are the revived forces of the Egyptian magicians, the Grecian oracles, the Roman haruspices, the Indian medicine-men. They are not divine, they are less than omnipotent, but they are more than human.

Our Lord has expressly warned us of them, and told us to test them, not by their power, but by their fruits, their holiness, humility, and homage to the name of Jesus and the Word of God; and their very existence renders it the more imperative that we should be able to present against them–like the rod of Moses which swallowed the magicians, and at last silenced their limited power–the living forces of a holy Christianity in the physical as well as the spiritual world.

THE MIRACLES OF CHRIST AND HIS APOSTLES WERE DESIGNED TO ESTABLISH THE FACTS AND DOCTRINES OF CHRISTIANITY; WE DO NOT NEED THEIR CONTINUANCE.

Why, then, do the critics call in question the existence of these facts and the credibility of these writings? How are the inhabitants of new countries to know the divinity of these oracles? What access have they, or indeed the great masses of men everywhere, to the archives of learning, or the manuscripts of the Bible? Nay, every generation needs a living Christ, and every new community needs “these signs following,” to confirm the word. And we have sometimes seen the plausible and persistent Agnostic, whom no reason could satisfy, silenced and confounded when brought face-to-face with some humble, illiterate woman, as she told him with glowing honesty, which he felt in the depths of his heart, that she had been raised up from lifelong helplessness by the word and name of Jesus only. Until he comes again the world will never cease to need the touch of His Power and Presence, “God also bearing them witness both with signs and wonders, and gifts of the Holy Spirit according to His own will.”

There is also a current misapprehension about the full design of Christ’s miracles which takes away one-half their beauty and value. They are looked upon solely and mainly as special testimonies to Christ’s power and divinity. But if this had been all, a few special and marked cases would have been sufficient. He would not then have healed the thousands who daily thronged Him. But we are told, on the contrary, that they were not isolated and occasional, but numerous and almost universal. “He healed all that had need of healing, and all that were sick and, not so much as a proof of His power, as to show that which He now wished them to know–His boundless love–to fulfill the ancient prophetic picture of the blessed Christ, and that it might be fulfilled that was spoken by the prophet Esaias, “Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses.”

But if it was necessary for Him to fulfill that character then, it is as much so still; as necessary yet that He should never cease to be true to the picture God drew of Him, which He drew of Himself. If this be not true still for us, then “Jesus Christ is” NOT “the Same, yesterday, today, and forever.” If this be not still true for us, then, perhaps, the other promises of the Scripture are not also true for us, and He has not borne our sins any more than our sickness and suffering. Nay, “His heart is still the same:

Kinsman, Friend and Elder Brother,
Is His everlasting name;
Thou art All in All to me,
Living One of Bethany.”

A common objection is urged in this way: Christ’s last promise in Mark embraces much more than healing; but if you claim one, you must claim all. If you expect the healing of the sick, you must also include the gift of tongues and the power to overcome malignant poisons; and if the gift of tongues has ceased, so in the same way has the power over disease. We cheerfully accept the severe logic, we cannot afford to give up one of the promises. We admit our belief in the presence of the Healer in all the charismata of the Pentecostal Church. We see no reason why an humble servant of Christ, engaged in the Master’s work, may not claim in simple faith the power to resist malaria and other poisons and malignant dangers; and we believe the gift of tongues was only withdrawn from the early Church as it was abused for vain display, or as it became unnecessary for practical use, through the rapid evangelization of the world; and it will be repeated as soon as the Church will humbly claim it for the universal diffusion of the Gospel. Indeed, instances are not wanting now of its apparent restoration in missionary labors, both in India and Africa.

Perhaps no objection is more strongly urged than the glory that redounds to God from our submission to His will in sickness, and the happy results of sanctified affliction. Well, if those who urge and claim to practice this suggestion would really accept their sickness, and lie passive under it, they would at least be consistent. But do they not send for a doctor, and do their best to get out of this sweet will of God? Is this meekly submitting to the affliction, and does not the submission usually come when the result is known to be inevitable?

We do not deny the happy results of many a case of painful sickness in turning the soul from some forbidden path and leading it into deeper experiences of God; nor do we question the deep and fervent piety, and spiritual advancement of many an invalid who cannot trust God for healing; but we are sure there is an immense amount of vague and unscriptural misunderstanding with respect to the principles of Christian discipline. We do not believe that God chastens an obedient child simply to make it good.

“FOR THIS CAUSE MANY ARE WEAK AND SICKLY AMONG YOU, AND MANY SLEEP; FOR IF WE WOULD JUDGE OURSELVES WE SHOULD NOT BE JUDGED.”

Here is a definite and unchangeable law of God’s dealings with His dear children. When we are judging ourselves we shall not be judged. While we hearken and obey, He “will put none of these diseases upon us which He brought upon the Egyptians.” His normal state for His faithful children is soundness of body, soul and spirit (1 Thess. 5: 23). His own prayer for them is that they may be in health and prosper even as their souls prospers. His will for them is to act in these things according to His word. It is ever “the good pleasure of His goodness,” and “that good and perfect and acceptable will of God.” “Many,” it is true, “are the afflictions of the righteous;” but it is also true that “the Lord delivereth him out of them all. He keepeth all his bones: not one of them is broken.”

And between “affliction” and sickness it must be well remembered there is a very clear distinction. At Marah, the children of Israel had to drink of bitter water, and it was only sweetened, not removed; as many a trial is sanctified and blessed. But it was right there that He made a statute and an ordinance of healing, and told them that if they would obey Him, they should not be sick, and He would be their constant Healer, thus showing them that Marah was not sickness. And in exact parallel, James says to us, 5: 13, “is any afflicted? let him pray;” that is, for grace and strength. But, “Is any sick? let him call for the elders of the Church,” and be healed. Affliction is “suffering with Christ;” and He was not sick. “In the world ye shall have tribulation;” but all the more we need a sound, strong heart, to bear and overcome.

It is objected that it is presumptuous to claim the healing of disease absolutely, and that the model of all true prayer is Christ’s language in the garden: “If it be possible, let this cup pass: nevertheless not My will, but Thine be done.” Yes, but they have forgotten that He knew it was not possible that this cup should pass, that in this case He was asking something which, to say the very least, He had no promise or warrant to, and which He repudiated instantly, saying, “Save me from this hour; but for this cause came I unto this hour. Father, glorify Thy Name.”

Certainly, in any such circumstances, when prompted by extreme distress to ask for something for which we have no clear warrant, promise or favorable intimation of the Divine will, we ought ever to refer the matter to the arbitration of that unknown will. But when we know from His own word to us that a blessing is in accordance with His will, that it is provided for, purchased and promised, is it not really evasive, uncandid, disingenuous, and really an affectation to come to Him in doubt and uncertainty, or couching our requests in the language of ambiguity? Is it not very much the same as if a son at college should still keep writing and asking your permission for things wherein you had already written the fullest directions in your first letter? Did Christ thus pray, when He asked for things He knew to be consistent with God’s will? Is it not as lawful for us to imitate Him in one prayer as another, at Bethany equally with Gethsemane? And there, what did He say? “Father, I know Thou hearest Me always,” and again, “Father, I will that they be with Me.” In His name may we not pray even as He, where His will is clearly made known? “If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what YE WILL, and it shall be done unto you.” Do we pray in indefiniteness when we ask for forgiveness? We take it and claim it, and being strong in faith, we thus most effectually glorify God.

WE ARE TOLD THAT THERE ARE MANY CASES OF FAILURE; and Paul and his companions are first enumerated. Paul’s inevitable thorn is kept as a precious relic to torment doubting Christians; and Trophimus and Epaphroditus are dragged forward on their couches to encourage the willing patient in the hospital of Doubting Castle. With regard to Paul’s thorn we must say,
FIRST: It is very uncertain if it was DISEASE; it was a messenger of Satan to BUFFET him, i.e., some humiliation–perhaps stammering.
SECONDLY: It was so far healed and more than healed, whatever it was, that it brought the power of Christ to rest upon him so mightily that he was abundantly enabled for all his labors and duties, and longed for more such provocations of blessing. And he who can see in this a feeble invalid laid aside from work, is afflicted with spiritual cross eyes.
THIRDLY: Before people can claim that their sickness is a heavenly visitation like Paul’s to keep them from being exalted above measure, they would need to have been up in the third heaven with him and heard things unlawful for a man to utter! And
FOURTHLY: Paul does give us elsewhere the account of his healing (2. Cor. 1: 10); and it was unmistakably by believing prayer and mighty faith even in God that raises the dead. As to Epaphroditus, he was healed through God’s mercy. Trophimus, doubtless, was also, although it must have been delayed. Healing, even by faith, is not always instantaneous. There are “miracles” and “gifts of healing,” the one sudden and stupendous, the other simple and probably gradual. That Trophimus should have been himself to blame for his illness or slowness of faith is not wonderful, and that there should be only two such cases in all these inspired personal sketches is most wonderful.

There are still cases of failure, but they may be accounted for, perhaps through defective knowledge or unbelief, disobedience to God in some way, failure to follow consistently the teachings of the Word and the Spirit or for a deeper spiritual discipline. And there are failures in the spiritual life–from the same or similar causes–which in no way disprove the reality of the Divine promises or the sufficiency of Christ’s grace.

“LET GOD THEN BE TRUE,” EVEN IF “EVERY MAN” BE “A LIAR.”

But we are told, if these things be so, people should never die. Why not? Why should faith go farther than the Word? Anything beyond that is presumption. The Word places a limit to human life, and all that Scriptural faith can claim is sufficiency of health and strength for our life-work and within its fair limits. It may be longer or shorter, but it need not, like the wicked, fail to live out half its days. It should be complete, satisfying, and as long as the work of life is yet undone. And then, when the close comes, why need it be with painful and depressing sickness, as the rotten apple falls in June from disease, and with a worm at the root? Why may it not be rather as that ripe apple would drop in September, mature, mellow, and ready to fall without a struggle into the gardener’s hand? So Job pictures the close of a good man’s life as the full maturity of “the shock of corn that cometh in its season.”

RESORT TO THE DOCTORS

We are asked by some, did not God make all these means, and does He not want us to use them? And, indeed, is it not presumption for us to expect Him to do anything unless we do all we can for ourselves? We answer, first: God has nowhere prescribed medical means, and we have no right to infer that drugs are ordinarily His means. They are not, as food, again and again referred to as necessary or enjoined for our use.

It is a most singular and unanswerable fact that in the whole history of the patriarchs no reference is made to the use of such means. In the story of Job, so full of vivid details, everybody else is described but the doctor, and everything in the universe but drugs. There is no physician in attendance, or surely we should have caught a glimpse of him in that chamber and when Job recovers, it is wholly from God’s direct hand, and when he himself gets down in his true place of humility to God and love to man. In the still more elaborate prescriptions, prohibitions and enactments of the Book of Leviticus about all the details of human life, even including the disease of leprosy, there is no remote intimation of a doctor or a drug store. And it is not until after the time of Solomon, and the importation, no doubt, of Egypt’s godless culture and science, that we find the first definite case of medical treatment; and there the patient dies, and dies under the stigma of unbelief and declension from God.

In the New Testament such “means” are referred to in hardly more complimentary terms, when the woman who touched the hem of His garment is described. If Luke were a physician, he abandoned his practice for evangelistic work, as may be strongly inferred from his itinerant life; for no practice could be maintained in such circumstances. Without going further, this much at least is clear:
FIRST, that God has not prescribed medicine.

SECONDLY, He has prescribed another way in the Name of Jesus, and provided for it in the atonement, appointed an ordinance to signalize it, and actually commanded and enjoined it.

And THIRDLY, all the provisions of grace are by FAITH, not by works. The use of remedies, if successful, usually gives the glory to man, and God will not do so. If the healing of sickness is one of the purchases of Christ’s atonement, and one of His prerogatives as our Redeemer, then He is jealous for it, and we will also be jealous. If it be part of the scheme of salvation, then we know that the whole scheme is framed according to the “law of faith” if the language of James be a command, then it excludes the treatment of disease by human remedies as much as the employment of one physician would exclude the treatment of another at the same time and for the same case. If it be God’s way of healing, then other methods must be man’s ways, and there must be some risk in deliberately repudiating the former for the latter.

We do not imply by this that the medical profession is sinful, or the use of means always wrong. There may be, there always will be, innumerable cases where faith is not exercised; and if natural means have, as they do have, a limited value, there is ample room for their exercise in these. But for the trusting and obedient child of God there is the more excellent way which His Word has clearly prescribed, and by which His name will be ever glorified afresh, and our spiritual life continually renewed.

The age is one of increasing rationalism, and unbelief is constantly endeavoring to eliminate all traces of direct supernatural working from the universe, and explain everything by second causes and natural development; and God, for this very reason, wants to show his immediate working wherever our faith will afford Him an opportunity. The Higher Criticism is industriously taking the miraculous from our Bibles, and a lower standard of Christian life is busy taking all that is divine out of our life. Let all who believe in a living God be willing to prove to a scoffing generation that “the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary,” for “in Him we live and move and have our being,” and that still there is “nothing too hard for the Lord.”

We will only refer in conclusion to the objection that these views of the truth UNDULY EXALT THE BODILY LIFE, and direct the minds of men from the transcendent interest of the immortal soul, promoting fanaticism, besides leading to other evils. The same objection might be brought against the earlier years of our Lord’s ministry, when the healing of the body was made an avenue to reach men’s souls, and a testimony of His spiritual teachings.

The doctrine of Christ’s healing power is so closely linked with the necessity of holiness, and the deeper truths and experiences of the spiritual life, that it tends, in a preeminent degree, to promote purity and earnestness. The power which heals the body usually imparts a much richer baptism of the Holy Ghost to the heart, and the retaining of this Divine life and health requires such constant fellowship with God, and such consecrated service for the Master, that the spiritual results far outweigh the temporal; and it is one of the most powerful checks and impulses in the lives of those that have truly received it.

The abuses complained of will usually be found connected with false teaching and unscriptural perversions of those things which rash or ambitious persons disseminate for their own ungodly ends. The true doctrine of healing through the Lord Jesus Christ is most humbling, holy, and practical; it exalts no man, it spares no sin, it offers no promises to the disobedient, it gives no strength for selfish indulgence or worldly ends, but it exalts the name of Jesus, glorifies God, inspires the soul with faith and power, summons to a life of self-denial and holy service, and awakens a slumbering Church and an unbelieving world with the solemn signals of a living God and a returning Master.

Extravagances, perversions, and counterfeits, we know there are; unauthorized and self-constituted healers, mercenary impostors, who give out that they are “some great one,” rash and indiscriminate anointings of persons who only bring discredit on the truth by their ignorance and inconsistency, and wolves in sheep’s clothing, who claim the name of Jesus for the passes of clairvoyance, the sorcery of spiritualism, and the performances of animal magnetism. But the truth of God is not chargeable with human error, and the counterfeit is often the best testimonial to the genuine. Let the ministers of the Lord Jesus answer and set aside these evils by claiming and exercising, in the power of the Holy Ghost, the gifts and offices once delivered to them, and let the people of God, in these perilous times, “discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth Him not.”



Chapter 4 – Principles of Divine Healing

There are certain principles underlying all the teachings of the Holy Scriptures with respect to healing; which it is important to understand and classify and which, when rightly understood, are most helpful to intelligent faith.

THE CAUSES OF DISEASE and suffering are distinctly traced to the Fall and sinful state of man. If sickness were part of the natural constitution of things, then we might meet it wholly on natural grounds, and by natural means. But if it be part of the curse of sin, it must have its true remedy in the great Redemption. That sickness is the result of the Fall, and one of the fruits of sin no one can surely question. Death, we are told, hath passed upon all, for that all have sinned, and the greater includes the less. It is named among the curses of Deuteronomy, which God was to send for Israel’s sin. Again, it is distinctly connected with Satan’s personal agency. He was the direct instrument of Job’s suffering, and our Lord definitely attributed the diseases of His time to his direct power. It was Satan who bound the paralyzed woman these eighteen years; and it was demoniacal influence which held and crushed the bodies and souls of those He delivered. If sickness be the result of evil spiritual agency, it is most evident that it must be met and counteracted by higher spiritual force, and not by mere natural treatment.

And again, on the supposition that sickness is a divine discipline and chastening it is still more evident that its removal must come, not through mechanical appliances, but through spiritual causes. It would be both ridiculous and vain for the arm of man to presume to wrest the chastening-rod from the Father’s hand by physical force or skill. The only way to avert His stroke is to submit the spirit in penitence to His will, and seek in humility and faith His forgiveness and relief; so that from whatever side we look at disease, it becomes more and more evident that its remedy must be found alone in God and the Gospel of His Redemption.

If the disease be the result of the fall, we may expect it to be embraced in the provisions of Redemption, and would naturally look for some intimation of a remedy in THE PREPARATORY DISPENSATION which preceded the Gospel. Nor are we disappointed. The great principle that God’s care and providence embraces the temporal and physical needs of his people as well as the spiritual, runs all through the Old Testament. Distinct provision for Divine healing is made in all the ordinances of Moses. And the prophetic picture of the Coming Deliverer is that of a great Physician as well as a glorious King and gracious Savior. The healing of Abimelech, Miriam, Job, Naaman and Hezekiah; the case of the Leper and the Brazen Serpent, the statute at Marah, and the blessings and curses at Ebal and Gerizim, the terrible rebuke of Asa, the one hundred and third Psalm, and the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, leave the testimony of the Old Testament clear and distinct that the redemption of the body was the Divine prerogative and plan.

THE PERSONAL MINISTRY OF JESUS CHRIST is the next great stage in the development of these principles. His own life was a complete summary of Christianity; and from His words and works we may surely gather the great intent of redemption. And what was the testimony of His life to physical healing? He went about their cities healing all manner of sickness and disease among the people. He healed all that had need of healing, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the Prophet, “Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses.” Now, when we remember that this was not an occasional incident, but a chief part of His ministry; that He began His work with it, that He continued it to the close of His life; that He did it on all possible occasions and in every variety of cases, that He did it heartily, willingly, and without leaving any doubt or question of His will; that He distinctly said to the doubting leper, “I will,” and was only grieved when men hesitated to fully trust Him and when we realize that in all this He was but unfolding the real purpose of His great redemption, and revealing His own unchanging character and love, and that he has distinctly assured us that He is still “the same yesterday, today, and for ever ” — surely we have a great principle to rest our faith upon, as secure as the Rock of Ages.

But redemption finds its center IN THE CROSS of Jesus Christ, and there we must look for the fundamental principle of Divine healing. It rests on the atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ. This necessarily follows from the first principle we have stated. If sickness be the result of the Fall, it must be included in the atonement of Christ, which reaches

“Far as the curse is found.”

But, again, it is most distinctly stated in the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, as we have seen: He is said to have borne our sickness and carried our pains, the word “bear” being the very same used for the atonement of sin; the same used elsewhere to describe the act of the scapegoat in bearing away the people’s guilt and the same used in the same chapter with respect to His “bearing the sins of many.” In the same sense, then, as He has borne away our sins has he also borne our sicknesses. And Peter also states that “He bare our sins in His own body on the tree . . . by whose stripes we are healed.” In His own body He has borne ALL OUR BODILY LIABILITIES for sin, and our bodies are set free. That one cruel “stripe” of His — for the word is singular — summed up in it all the aches and pains of a suffering world; and there is no longer need that we should suffer what He has sufficiently borne. Thus our healing becomes a great redemption right, which we simply claim as our purchased inheritance through the blood of His Cross.

But there is something higher even than the Cross. It is THE RESURRECTION of our Lord. There the Gospel of Healing finds the fountain of the deepest life. The death of Christ destroys the root of sickness: sin. But it is the life of Jesus which supplies the source of health and life for our redeemed bodies. The body of Christ is the living fountain of all our vital strength. He who came forth from Joseph’s tomb, with the new physical life of the resurrection, is the Head of His people for life and immortality.

Not for Himself alone did He receive the power of an endless life, but as our life. He gave Him to be Head over all things for His Church, which is His body. We are members of His body, His flesh, and His bones. The healing which Christ gives us is nothing less than His own new physical life infused into our body from His own very heart, and bringing us into fellowship with His own inmost being. That Risen and Ascended One is the fountain and measure of our strength and life. We eat His flesh and drink His blood, and He dwelleth in us, and we in Him. As He lived in the Father, so he that eateth Him shall live by Him. This is the great, the vital, the most precious principle of physical healing in the name of Jesus. It is the very life of Jesus manifested in our mortal flesh.

It follows from this, that it must be wholly A NEW LIFE. The Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ have made an awful gulf between the present and past of every redeemed life. Henceforth, if any man be in Christ, he is A NEW CREATION. Old things have passed away, ALL THINGS HAVE BECOME NEW. The death of Jesus has slain all our old self.. The life of Jesus is the spring of all new life. This is true of our physical life. It is not the restoration of the old natural strength to life. It is not the building up of our former constitution. It is the letting go of all the old dependencies. It is often the failure and decay of all our natural strength. It is a strength which “out of weakness is made strong,” which has no resources to start with; which creation-like, is made out of nothing; which resurrection-like, comes out of the dark tomb, and the extinction of all previous help and hope. This principle is of immense importance in the practical experience of healing. So long as we look for it in the old natural life, we shall be disappointed. But when we cease to put confidence in the flesh, and look only to Christ and His supernatural life in us for our strength of body as well as spirit, we shall find that we can do all things through Christ that strengtheneth us.

It follows from this that the physical redemption which Christ brings, is NOT MERELY HEALING, BUT ALSO LIFE. It is not the readjustment of our life on the old basis, leaving it thenceforward to go like a machine upon the natural plane, but it is the infusion of a new kind of life and strength. Therefore it is as fully within the reach of persons in health as those who are diseased. It is simply a higher kind of life, the turning of life’s water into His heavenly wine.

Therefore, it must also be kept by constantly abiding in Him, and receiving from Him. It is not a permanent deposit, but a daily dependence, a renewing of the inward man day by day, a strength which comes only as we need it, and continues only while we dwell in Him. Such a LIFE is a very sacred thing. It gives a peculiar sanctity to every look, tone, act, organ and movement of the body. We are living on the life of God, and we must live like Him and for Him. A body thus divinely quickened adds tenfold power to the soul, and all the service of the Christian life. Words spoken in this Divine energy, works done through the very life of God, will be clothed with a positive effectiveness which must make men feel that the body as well as the spirit is indeed the very Temple of the Holy Ghost.

The great agent in bringing this new life into our life is THE HOLY GHOST. The redemption work of Jesus cannot be completed without His blessed ministry. Not as a visible physical presence does this Jesus of Nazareth now meet the sick, and halt, and blind, but through a spiritual manifestation. It has all the old physical power, and produces all the ancient results upon the suffering frame, but the approach is spiritual, not physical.

The presence must be brought to our consciousness; the contact of our need with His life must come through the Holy Spirit. So Mary had to learn in the very first moment of the resurrection. “Touch me not — I ascend.” Thus, henceforth, must she know Him as the Ascended One. So Paul had ceased to know Christ Jesus after the flesh. So He had to guard the disciples at Capernaum, where, speaking of the Living Bread — the Source of healing — He adds: “What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where He was before? It is the Spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing.”

This is the reason why many find it hard to meet the Healer. They do not know the Holy Ghost. They do not know God spiritually. The sun in the heavens would be but a cold and glaring ball of ice were it not for the atmosphere which brings His warmth and light to us and diffuses them through our world. And Christ’s life and love cannot reach us without the intermediate Spirit, the Light, the Atmosphere, the Divine Medium who brings and sheds abroad His life and light, His love and Presence in our being, the taking of the things of Jesus and showing them to us, extracting the very essence of His life and frame, and sweetly diffusing it through every vessel, nerve, organ and function of our being.

Yes, He is the great Quickener. It was through the Holy Ghost that Jesus cast out devils on earth,
and now, if the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal body through His Spirit that dwelleth in us.

This new life must come, like all the blessings of Christ’s redemption, as the FREE GRACE OF GOD, WITHOUT WORKS, AND WITHOUT DISTINCTION OF MERIT OR RESPECT OF PERSONS.

Everything that comes through Christ must come as grace. There can be no works mingled with justifying faith, except those which come after justification, and as its fruits. Any others are dead works, and fatal to our salvation. Even so, our healing must be wholly of God, or not of grace at all.

IF CHRIST HEALS HE MUST DO IT ALONE. This principle ought to settle for ever the question of using means in connection with faith for healing. The natural and the spiritual, the earthly and the heavenly, the works of man and the grace of God, cannot be mixed, any more than you could expect to harness a tortoise with a locomotive, or make a great sea cable part of iron and part of hemp. They cannot work together. The gifts of the Gospel are Sovereign gifts. God can do the most difficult things for us Himself. But HE CANNOT HELP OUR SELF-SUFFICIENCY to do the easiest. A hopeless case is therefore much more hopeful than one where we think we can do something ourselves. We must

“Venture on Him, venture wholly,
Let no other trust intrude.”

If healing is to be sought by natural means, let us get all the best results of skill and experience. But if it is to be through the name of Jesus it must be by GRACE ALONE.

It follows also in the same connection that if it be a part of the Gospel and a gift of Christ, it must be an impartial one, limited only by the great “whosoever” of the Gospel. It is not a special gift of discriminating favoritism, but a great and common heritage of faith and obedience. It is “Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.” It is true all who come must conform to the simple conditions of obedient faith; but these are impartial without respect of persons, and within the reach of all.

The simple condition of this great Blessing, alike the condition of all the blessings of the Gospel is: FAITH WITHOUT SIGHT. Grace without works and faith without sight must always go together as twin principles of Glorious Gospel. The one thing God asks from all who are to receive His grace is that they shall trust His simple word where they have nothing else but His word to trust. But this must be real trust. It must believe and doubt not. If God’s word be true at all it is absolutely and utterly true.

A very small grain of mustard seed will do, and it will split open with its living roots the great rocks and mountains, but it must be an entire grain. The grain must be in its integrity. One little laceration will kill its life. And one doubt will destroy the efficiency of faith; and therefore it must begin in the soul, taking God simply and nakedly at His word. A faith that is going to wait for signs and evidence will never be strong. Plants that begin by leaning will always be fragile and need a trellis. Indeed the faith which rests upon seeing is not faith. Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet have believed.

Abraham had to believe God and take the new name of faith and fatherhood before there was any indication of probability and when, indeed, every natural sign contradicted and stultified it. It is beautiful to notice the form of expression in Genesis 17. First he is told, “I will make thee a father of many nations.” Then comes the change of Abraham’s name which was the profession of his faith, and the acknowledgment before a scorning world that he believed God. Then follows God’s next word. But how wonderful! The tense is completely changed. It is no longer a promise, but an accomplished fact; “I HAVE MADE THEE a father of many nations.” It is done. Faith has turned the future into the past, and now God calls the things that are not as though they were. So we must believe, and receive the healing life of Jesus and all the blessings of the Gospel.

THE OBLIGATION

Is there any principle involving the obligation of faith in reference to physical healing? Is it an optional matter with us how we shall be healed, and whether we shall trust God or look to man? Is it “an ordinance and a statute” for us, and a matter of simple obedience? Is it His great prerogative to deal with the bodies He has redeemed, and an impertinence for man, and unsanctified man, to tamper with them, and an equal impertinence for us to choose some other way than His? Is the Gospel of salvation a commandment as well as a promise, and is the Gospel of healing of equal authority? Has He chosen to legislate about the way in which the plague which has entered His world shall be dealt with, and have we any business to interfere with His great Health Laws? HAS HE AT ENORMOUS COST, PROVIDED A REMEDY FOR HIS CHILDREN as part of His redemption, and IS HE JEALOUS FOR THE HONOR AND RIGHTS OF HIS DEAR SON’S NAME in this matter? Does He claim to be the owner of His children’s bodies, and does He claim the right to care for them? Has He left us one great prescription for disease, and is any other course, unauthorized, disobedient, and at our own risk? Surely these questions answer themselves, and leave but one course open to every simple and obedient child of God.

THE ORDER of God’s dealings with our souls and bodies is regulated by certain fixed principles.

A. He works from within outwards, beginning with our spiritual nature and then diffusing his life and power through our physical being. Many persons come to God for healing whose spiritual life is wholly defective and wrong. God does not refuse the healing, but He begins in the depths of the soul, and when it is prepared to receive His life, he can begin to heal the body.

B. There is a constant parallel between the state of the soul and body. John prays that Gaius “may be in health and prosper, EVEN AS his soul prospereth.” A little cloud of sin upon the heart will leave a shadow upon the brain and nerves and a pressure upon the whole frame. A malicious breath of spiritual evil will poison the blood and depress the whole system. And a clear, calm and confident spirit will bring vigor into all the physical life, and open the way for all the full strong pulses of the Lord’s own life in us.

C. Hence, also, healing will often be gradual in its development, as the spiritual life grows and faith takes a firmer hold of Christ. The principle of the Divine life, like the natural, is “first the blade; then the ear; after that the full corn in the ear. There must ever be much preliminary work. The seed must be planted and die.” “The stalk must rise and grow strong enough to bear its heavy fruit. Many persons want the head of wheat while the blade is yet tender. Now it would only overwhelm us by its weight. We must have deep and quiet strength to sustain our higher blessing. Sometimes this preparation is all completed beforehand. Then God can work very rapidly. But in each case He knows the order and process best adapted to the development of the whole man, which is ever His great end in all His workings in us.

THE LIMITATIONS of Healing are also fixed by certain principles.

A. It is not the immortal life. Why should people ever die if Christ will always heal? Because faith can only go as far as God’s promise, and God has nowhere promised that we shall never die during this Dispensation. The promise is fullness of life and health and strength up to the measure of our natural life, and until our life-work is done. True, it is the life of the resurrection which we have; but it is not the whole of it, but only the first fruits. In speaking of our immortal life in 2 Cor. 5:5, the Apostle says: “Now He that hath wrought us for this self-same thing is God, who also hath given us the earnest of the Spirit” That is, as our earnest was a handful of the very soil of the purchased farm, but only a handful, so God has given us now, by His Spirit, in our new physical life, a handful of the very life of the resurrection. But it is only a handful, and the fullness will not come until His coming. But that handful is worth all the soil of earth and the natural life a hundredfold.

B. The next limitation has reference to the measure and degree in which we can expect this life in our present state. Shall we have strength for all sorts of supernatural exploits and extraordinary exertions? We have the promise of sufficient strength for all the will of God and all the service of Christ. But we shall have no strength for mere display, and certainly none to waste in recklessness, or spend in selfishness and sin. Within the limits of our God-appointed work, and these limits may be very wide — much wider than any mere natural strength — we can do all things through Christ that strengtheneth us, and may fearlessly undertake all labors, self-denials, and difficulties in the face of exposure, weakness, unhealthy conditions of climate, and the most engrossing demands upon strength and time, where Christ clearly leads and calls us; and we shall have His protecting power and find that “God is able to make all grace abound so that we, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound unto every good work.” But let us touch the forbidden earth, get out of that sacred circle of His will, or spend our strength on self or sin, and our life will wither — like Jonah’s gourd and Samson’s arm. Yes, it must be true in our life; all true — not one part wanting, “OF Him, and THROUGH Him, and TO HIM – are all things to whom be glory for ever. Amen.”



Chapter 5 – Scripture Testimonies, Part 1

The value of testimonies upon this subject cannot be questioned. They are entirely Scriptural; and they often bring the Gospel down to the personal level and contact of the sufferer, as mere abstract teaching cannot do. But they should always be simple, modest, as impersonal as possible, and illustrate principles. This is the character of all the Scripture testimonies. We shall glance at a few of these.

THE CASE OF JOB

This is the earliest case fully detailed in the Scriptures.

His sickness came from Satan’s touch. His agency in sickness is most distinctly taught by our Lord also, and his power is yet undiminished.

Job’s sickness was divinely permitted. It was designed to lead him to search his heart, and see his utter need of sanctification.

His sickness did not sanctify him, but only led to deeper exhibitions of his sin, and self-righteousness. Sickness does not purify anyone, although it may lead us to see our need of holiness and to receive it from God.

His sickness was removed when he saw his sin and acknowledged it before God. This came to him when God revealed Himself. Then he cried: “Now mine eye seeth Thee: wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” Then came his complete justification, and with it a spirit of forgiveness and love for his enemies. And then, as he prayed for them, the Lord turned his own captivity. When we get right with God, we do not need to pray a great deal for ourselves. As we pray for others, our own blessing will often come. Job’s healing made all things new, and all his blessings were doubled. And no doubt the spiritual blessing was the deepest of all.

How instructive to watch this case lying in the hands of God until the soul is ready to learn his spiritual lesson, and then receive from God’s own hand life and restoration!

THE WOUNDED ISRAELITES AND THE BRAZEN SERPENT. (Num. 21.)

This sickness came from sin. They murmured, and God gave them something to murmur for. It is a serious matter to complain, for it is sure to bring the thing we fear, or a worse “I feared a fear, and it came upon me.”

This sickness came from Satan; from the serpent. So, still, he stings our life, and poisons our blood. It was a fiery serpent. The Hebrew words are “The serpents, the seraphim.” All our spiritual adversaries are not groveling worms. Many of them are lofty and transcendently wise.

The remedy was in the likeness of the disease; in short, a figure of the serpent with the poison extracted, and a striking intimation to the suffering camp and a sin-stricken world that Satan is robbed of his sting, and sickness and sin are but mere shadows of their former selves.

There was also in that brazen serpent the thought of Jesus made for us, Jesus assuming the vile and dishonored name of sinful man, and counted by God, and treated by men, as if He were indeed a serpent and a criminal. Thus for us has He taken the sting from Satan, sin, and death, and hung upon the uplifted cross the trophy of victory.

The healing came by looking at the Brazen Serpent. There is unspeakable power in a look. A look of evil chills the soul. A look of purity and love transfigures it. The eye brings into the soul the object of vision. Looking to the sun, it is present in the eye. Looking unto Jesus brings His life into our whole being.

This was physical life. The same life still comes from the cross for both soul and body, WHILE WE LOOK unto Jesus.

NAAMAN. (2. Kings 5.)

This was a typical case of disease. Leprosy was the peculiar type of sin, destroying both soul and body. It was the especial stigma of the physical effects of sin.

The instrument of this cure was, in the first instance, a Hebrew maid; and in her great usefulness we learn how God can use a very humble messenger and an incidental word. Indeed, Naaman’s own servants, a little later, saved his blessing for him by their wise counsel.

The lesson of humble and Obedient Faith must next be learned. The proud self and will of Naaman must die before his body can be healed by the Divine touch. And so Elisha meets his splendid state with quiet independence, and sends him a simple and humbling message to wash seven times in the Jordan and be clean. The sick are often deeply wounded by our seeming neglect, but God sometimes teaches them thus the lowliness of faith, and takes their thoughts of themselves and others, Naaman, like all other proud sinners, at first refuses the cross, and is about to lose his blessing when a word of honest frankness from his servants brings him to his senses, and sends him to Jordan.

The Faith of Naaman consisted in his doing just what the prophet told him. He took God’s way without qualification, and he persevered in it till his blessing came. Perhaps the first or second or sixth time there was no sign of healing; but he pressed on, and at length the wondrous blessing came, the flesh of a little child, and the acknowledgment and sole worship of the great Jehovah he had found.

His request for a gift of earth from the place of his healing was a beautiful foreshadowing of that Earnest of the greater future whom we also receive, the Holy Ghost. The word earnest means a handful of soil. Naaman took home with him a handful of Canaan’s soil; and we, in our healing, receive the earnest of the Spirit, a part of Heaven begun on earth.

It is beautiful to see how Elisha sends him away leaning only on God. To his question about bowing in the house of Rimmon, Elisha will give no direct answer, but throws him on God alone, and bids him go in peace. How little man appears in all this! and how simple and glorious is God!

But Satan, too, must have a hand. And he usually shows his hand in some mercenary scheme like Gehazi’s. So still, spiritualism and kindred arts of Satan seek to make merchandise of the things of God. But if you look closely, you will see the leper hand and face as white as snow.

HEZEKIAH. (2. Kings 28.)

It was a hopeless case. All men’s reasonings about the part that the remedy had in curing him ought to be set at rest by the fact that he was beyond the reach of every remedy, for even God had said that he should die, and not live. Man and means could, therefore, have nothing to do with his cure; it was wholly Divine.

He turned to God in humility. He made no attempt to find help from man. He threw himself helplessly on the mercy of the Lord. His prayer was not a very trustful one; but God heard his helpless cry, and sent deliverance.

The answer to his prayer was definite and clear. Fifteen years more of life from God Himself. It was sent to Isaiah, and communicated to him; and he at once believed it, and began to praise.

It was accompanied by a double sign. First a reversal of the dial 15 degrees, and then a poultice of figs. Both are called signs. The figs were not medicinal, for medicine was of no avail, but symbolical, and therefore administered by a prophet, not a physician.

The sequel of his healing was unworthy of it. Hezekiah rendered not again according to the benefit, but his heart was lifted up, and long years afterwards the bitter fruits of his sin and folly continued to prove how solemn a thing it is to receive God’s great mercies, and how sacredly our redeemed lives must be used for Him. People are always asking, ” Did not Hezekiah’s case prove the rightness of using remedies?” No. It proved the rightness of doing exactly what God tells us in regard to our healing. God told Naaman to wash in the Jordan. Anything else would have been disobedience. God told Hezekiah to use figs. Anything else would have been disobedience. If God had told us to use figs, anything else would be disobedience. But God has told us to use the anointing oil and the prayer of faith, and is anything else genuine obedience?

THE NOBLEMAN’S SON. (John 4.)

This was Christ’s first miracle of healing. It seems to speak peculiarly to our own times.

It teaches us that we do not need the physical and visible presence of Jesus to heal us. He was far from this sick child and simply spake a word of power, which crossed these intervening spaces with Almighty energy, even as it still can reach from Heaven to earth. “Oh, if He were only here!” you say. Nay, His first great miracle was performed from a distance perhaps as great as between earth and Heaven.

It was by simple, naked faith, without sight or signs. The Lord Jesus had to press this farther away from all but His own simple word, “Except ye see signs and wonders,” He exclaimed, “ye will not believe.” And then He tested his faith by a simple word, “Go thy way; thy son liveth;” and the man accepted the hard lesson, believed the naked word, and the child was made whole. He showed his faith by quietly going back and ceasing any more to clamor for the Lord’s going.

This case began at a fixed moment, and developed quietly and gradually, as so many are now healed. “He inquired at what hour he began to amend.” And the answer was that at a certain moment the fever broke. He was now convalescent. So still the dear Master works for all who trust Him. Faith has both its instants and its hours. We must learn to accept both; to count the death-blow struck at the moment of our believing, and then to follow on as it works out all its stages of blessing.

THE HEALING OF PETER’S MOTHER-IN-LAW. (Mark 1.)

This was Christ’s second recorded miracle of healing. He had just come from the Synagogue where, amid the astonishment of the people, He had cast out a demon. Peter’s wife’s mother was lying sick of fever. It was, then, a case of ordinary disease. And yet our Lord distinctly recognizes another agency at the back of the fever. For “He REBUKED the fever,” and this implies some personal and evil agent that must have caused it. He would not rebuke a mere natural law. There is no blame where there is no personal will. Nay, the fever was but the blistering touch of a demon hand; and this was what He rebuked.

Next, she must actively take hold of the healing power which He stands over her to administer. He took her by the hand, and lifted her up, and she arose. There was of course, His mighty touch and Almighty help. But there was also her cooperation, her grasping His extended hand, her shaking off the torpor and weariness of disease, her effort to arise, and her rising. Thus we must meet His help and power.

And then there was the use of her new strength in ministering to Him and them. This was the best proof of healing, the best use of it too. So must we ever give our new life to God, and in ministering to others and forgetting ourselves, we shall find our own strength continually renewed. As we give our life we shall save it; and as we serve others He will administer to all our needs. It is a blessed exchange of responsibility and care to find that we have nothing to do but live for Him, and He but one business, to live for us, and supply all our need.

THE HEALING OF THE MULTITUDE. (Matt. 8.)

The next cases of healing we read of in the life of Christ were a large number of promiscuous cases on the evening of the Sabbath on which He healed Peter’s mother-in-law. They had been gathering all day long, and waiting until the Sabbath was past. And as soon the hour of six o’clock had come, they pressed upon Him from every side, in great numbers and variety, and He healed them all. Now the first lesson we learn from these cases is connected with this very fact, that they waited until the Sabbath was past. It shows how exactly their prevalent ideas of healing resembled the godless ideas of our own secular age. They considered the body, and all that pertained to it, to be purely secular. Healing, therefore, was a mere secular calling, and, as such, unfit work for the holy Sabbath day. Is not this just what modern unbelief has taught the churches of Christendom? The cure of the body is a matter for natural laws and remedies, and secular physicians, a profession to be studied and used for secular profit like any other business, but in no sense as sacred and holy as the salvation and culture of the soul. For the present our Lord met them on their own ground; but the day soon came when He deliberately and purposely healed on the Sabbath day, that He might repudiate and trample down this absurd and godless idea, and show to men that the body was as sacred as the soul; that its restoration was as much part of God’s redemption; that it in no sense was left to be the subject of mere professional treatment; that it was His own holy prerogative and business to heal it; and that it was as holy and sacred work for the Sabbath day as the worship of the Temple or the salvation of the souls of men. The next lesson taught by these cases is the universality of His healing. He healed all that had need. He wished to show that it was not for favorite cases like the mother-in-law of an Apostle, but for all poor, sinful, suffering lives that could trust Him.

And the highest and most helpful of all the lessons is the way in which these cases are linked with the prophecy in Isaiah, announcing the true character of the Messiah as the Bearer of Sickness and Infirmity. It was no mere incidental fact, therefore, that He was healing these sufferers; it was no special and exceptional display of His power as the Son of God. But it was the real purpose and design of His Messiahship; and so all the ages can come to Him and lay upon Him their burdens and pains.

How deep and full these words, “Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses!” Himself, not Himself and physicians, but Himself alone; Himself, not Himself and us, but He takes the whole burden Himself, and leaves us utterly free; Himself, then the healing cannot be had apart from having Him. It is all wrapped up in Himself. His life in us, His indwelling, His body, His flesh; and His bones. Himself took and bare, not merely once, but for ever, not only lifting, but keeping, and carrying for ever. Blessed Healing! Blessed Healer!

THE LEPER. (Mark 1.)

This occurred soon after, in one of Christ’s tours through Galilee.

The request of this man is a good specimen of the state of mind in which we find the average Christian. He has full confidence in the power of Christ to heal, but is very uncertain about His willingness. Now if a friend is going to doubt me at all, I should much rather he would come to me and say, “I am sure you would help me if you could,” than “I know you have it in your power to aid me, but I have little confidence in your disposition to do it.” When will men see that this easy good-natured talk about God’s will involves the MOST SUBTLE AND OFFENSIVE DISTRUST?

Christ’s answer to him is explicit and emphatic and ought to settle the question of His will to heal the sincere and trusting sufferer,”I will; be thou clean.” There is no evasion or ambiguity, no hesitation or conditioning. It is a great, prompt, kingly answer, and in it all ages may hear His word to us all.

The touch of Christ meant a great deal to a leper. It was a long time since a hand of love had touched him. It was not a cold or mechanical touch. He was moved with compassion. His whole heart of love and his very life were in it. Yes, He helps us, not because His promise compels Him, but with overflowing love and unbounded condescension. He touches our immortal life with His own, and makes our leper hearts quiver with the fresh warm blood of His being.

He must then go to the priest at Jerusalem, and make a proper acknowledgment and testimony, and hold back all other testimony until he has borne witness before the religious authorities of the nation. And so we must bear witness, too, of His mighty works in us, and we must do it where He wants it, perhaps in the very hardest place for us, and IN THE VERY FACE OF RELIGIOUS PRIDE AND OPPOSITION. It was a long journey from Galilee to Jerusalem, but if our testimony requires as great a sacrifice for Him, is not His love worth it all?

THE PARALYTIC. (Mark 2.)

This is one of the most remarkable of Christ’s healing miracles, because He now, for the first time, brought out the doctrine of sin in connection with sickness, and assumed the right on earth to forgive sins. And from this moment He was regarded as a blasphemer. This poor man came for healing, but the Lord saw a deeper need that must first be met. His spiritual life must precede the physical. And so He speaks the word of pardon first. “Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.” So we must ever begin. And how many have been led to the very thought of salvation by their need of healing!

Then follows his physical healing. But this, too must be taken by himself in the exercise of bold obedient faith. He was not healed prostrate on that mat. He must rise up, put away his bed, and walk. Christ will not heal you in your bed. You must arise and step out upon His strength.

He was not, as is commonly supposed, healed through the faith of the men who brought him to Jesus, but through his own. Their faith laid him at the feet of Jesus, and brought him the word of forgiving mercy. But his own faith must claim the healing. And it must have been a real faith which could rise up before that throng and carry his bed. The faith of others can do much for us, ADDED to our own, but an unbelieving heart can have nothing from the Lord.

The place of healing, as a token of forgiveness and a sign of Christ’s saving power, is very solemn. He did heal this man, that they might know that the Son of man has power on earth to forgive sin. And Christ is ever wanting to convince the world of the reality of His Gospel by His physical miracles. How can we expect men to believe that His spiritual gifts are real when He does not manifest sufficient power to overcome the physical evils of our life? What right has any man to be sure that any part of his religion is real when his faith has never had enough of vigor to accomplish any really difficult thing in his practical life?

THE LAME MAN AT BETHESDA. (John 5.)

This miracle occurred in Jerusalem about the middle of His ministry. It was His first open and deliberate case of healing on the Sabbath day, and was purposely designed to defy their absurd ideas about the secular nature of disease and healing, and show them that it was sacred enough to be done on the Sabbath day, and to be a part His spiritual ministry. Many people are still afraid of unduly exalting the importance of the body, forgetting that whenever Christ touches it He makes it the channel and the vessel of all holy life and blessing.

The next great lesson of this case has reference to the folly of the things that men depend upon for healing. This man was looking to the fountain of Bethesda to heal him, and had some superstitious idea about its being troubled at times with healing virtues. Now it happens that the verse about the angel stepping in at certain seasons is an interpolation, and that was all a silly lie. So foolish and so false are the hopes of those who look to earthly sources of healing. They disappoint or disappear like Bethesda and its false legend. When the Lord undertook to heal him, He paid no attention to Bethesda or any other means, but spake a single word of power, and bade him go forth in the strength of God.

There is a lesson, too, for the waiting ones who are just hoping for some day of help to come, and go on hoping down to the grave. When Jesus healed him He dispelled all his dreamy future, and started him on the practical and solid ground of a present act of decision. So still hope is often mistaken for faith. The test of faith is that it is always present, and takes the blessing now.

Another most important lesson also is the folly and helplessness of leaning on others. “Sir, I have no man to put me in,” expresses the languid dependence of hundreds still who are expecting healing through the help of others, and paralyzing all their own strength and power of believing by looking to some one else’s faith and prayers. Others cannot help us until we firmly believe for ourselves. If we cling to them our hands bind and impede them, like the clinging of a drowning man to his rescuer, and both may sink together. But when we have a distinct hold of Christ for ourselves, then He can give our friends a similar grasp for and with us.

Again, “Wilt thou be made whole?” expresses the real element of effectual faith. It acts through a firm and decided will. Faith is not mere will power, but its seat and region is the will. This is the mightiest thing God has given to a man, and no man can receive much from God without a firm and decided choice. We must first see that it is His will to make us whole, and then we must claim it for ourselves with a strength and tenacity which will carry along with it all the power of our being.