Adam, standing between the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, yielded to Satan, chose and took of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. That decision determined the lines of his development. From then on, he could command knowledge; he knew. But the fruit of that tree of knowledge made the first man overdevelop his soul. The emotion was touched because the fruit was pleasant to the eyes, making him desire; the mind with its reasoning power was developed, for he was made wise; and the will was strengthened, so that in the future he could always decide which way he would go. The whole fruit ministered to the expansion and full development of the soul, so that not only was the man a living soul, but from henceforth man will live by the soul. It is not merely that man has a soul, but that from that day on, the soul, with its independent powers of free choice, usurps the place of the spirit as the animating power of man.
We have to distinguish between two things, for the difference is most important. God does not mind that we should have a soul such as He gave to Adam. But what God has set Himself to do is to reverse something. There is something in man today which is not just the fact of having and exercising a soul, but which constitutes a living by the soul. It was this that Satan brought about in the Fall. He trapped man into taking a course by which he could develop his soul so as to derive from it his very spring of life.
We must, however, be careful. To remedy this does not mean that we are going to cross out the soul altogether. You cannot do that. When today the Cross is really working in us, we do not become inert, insensate, characterless. No, we still possess a soul, and whenever we receive something from God the soul will still be used in relation to it, as an instrument, a faculty, in a true subjection to Him. But the point is – are we keeping within God’s appointed limit, within the bounds set by Him in the Garden at the beginning, with regard to the soul, or are we getting outside those bounds?
What God is now doing is the pruning work of the vine dresser. In our souls, there is an uncontrolled development, an untimely growth, that has to be checked and dealt with. God must cut that off. So now there are two things before us to which our eyes must be opened. On the one hand, God is seeking to bring us to the place where we live by the life of His Son. On the other hand, He is doing a direct work in our hearts to undo that other natural resource that is the result of the fruit of knowledge. Every day we are learning these two lessons – a rising up of the life of this One, and a checking and a handing over to death of that other soul-life. These two processes go on all the time, for God is seeking the fully developed life of His Son in us in order to manifest Himself, and to that end He is bringing us back, as to our soul, to Adam’s starting point. So Paul says ‘We who live are always delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh.’ (2 Corinthians 4:11).
What does this mean? It simply means that I will not take any action without relying on God. I will find no sufficiency in myself. I will not take any step just because I have the power to do so. Even though I have that inherited power within me, I will not go ahead solely upon it as a basis; I will put no reliance on myself. By taking the fruit, Adam became possessed of an inherent power to act, but a power which, by its independence of God, played right into Satan’s hands. You lose that power to act when you come to know the Lord. The Lord cuts it off and you find you can no longer act on your own initiative. You have to live by the life of another; you have to draw everything from Him.
“We may, in a manner of courtesy to God, say ‘If the Lord does not want it, I cannot do it,’ but in reality our subconscious thought is that really we can do it quite well ourselves, even if God does not ask us to do it nor empower us for it. Too often we have been caused to act, to think, to decide, to have power, regardless of Him. Many of us Christians today are men with overdeveloped souls. We have grown too big in ourselves. When we are in that condition, it is possible for the life of the Son of God in us to be confined and crowded almost out of action.
It is not so much a matter of what we are doing, but of what powers we are employing to do it, and who is controlling those powers. The man of God can use words that may well be eloquent, but there is the mark of the Cross upon that eloquence, and the controlling hand of the Spirit of God is apparent in its use.
The difference between natural and spiritual gifts is that anything we can do without prayer and without an utter dependence upon God must come from the spring of natural life that is tainted with the flesh. We must see this clearly. Of course, it is not true that those only are suited for a particular work who lack the natural gift for it. The point is that, whether naturally gifted or not – and we should praise God for all His gifts – they must know the touch of the Cross in death upon all that is of nature, and their complete dependence upon the God of resurrection. All too readily do we envy our neighbor who has some outstanding natural gift, and fail to realize that our own possession of it, apart from such a working of the Cross, could prove a barrier to the very thing that God is seeking to manifest in us.
The Lord has shown me that I can do anything, but that He has said, ‘apart from Me you can do nothing.’ So it comes to this, that everything I have done and can still do apart from Him is nothing!
We have to come to that valuation. It does not mean that we cannot do a lot of things, for we can. We can take meetings and build churches, we can go to the ends of the earth and found missions, and we can seem to bear fruit; but remember that the Lord’s Word is ‘every plant which My heavenly Father planted not, shall be rooted up’ (Matthew 15:13). God is the only legitimate Originator of the universe and His Holy Spirit is the only legitimate initiator in our hearts. Anything that we plan and set our foot without Him has the taint of the flesh upon it, and it will never reach the realm of the Spirit however earnestly we seek God’s blessing on it. It may last for years, and then we may think we will adjust here and improve there and maybe bring it on a better plane, but it cannot be done.
When God opens our eyes to see that the natural life is something that, in itself, He can never use in His work, then we find we do not enjoy the doctrine any longer. Rather we loathe ourselves for the impurity that is in us but when that point is reached, God begins His work of deliverance (which will be dealt with in the next lesson).
The Light of God and Knowledge
It is only when one has been apprehended by God, and seeks to go forward with Him, that one finds how necessary light is. There is a fundamental need for light in order for us to know the mind of God; to know what is of the spirit and what is of the soul; to know what is divine and what is merely of man; to discern what is truly heavenly and what is only earthly; to understand the difference between things which are spiritual and things which are carnal; to know whether God is really leading us or whether we are just moved by our feelings, senses, or imaginations. It is when we have reached a position where we would like to follow God fully that we find light to be the most necessary thing in the Christian life.
One question comes up again and again. It is ‘How can I know that I am walking in the Spirit? How do I distinguish which prompting within me is from the Holy Spirit and which is from myself?’ It seems that all are alike in this; but some have gone further. They are trying to look within, to differentiate, to discriminate, to analyze, and in doing so are bringing themselves into deeper bondage. Now this is a situation which is really dangerous to Christian life, for inward knowledge will never be reached along the barren path of self-analysis.
We are never told in the Word of God to examine our inward condition, that way leads only to uncertainty, vacillation and despair. Of course, we have to have self-knowledge. We have to know what is going on within. We do not want to live in a fool’s paradise; to have gone altogether wrong and yet not know we have gone wrong; to have a Spartan will and yet think we are pursuing the will of God. But such self-knowledge does not come by our turning within; by our analyzing our feelings and motives and everything that is going on inside, and then trying to pronounce whether we are walking in the flesh or in the Spirit.
There are several passages in the Psalms which illumine this subject. The first is in Psalm 36:9 ‘For with You is the fountain of life. In Your light we see light.’ In that light everything becomes clear. No sight ever comes by feeling or analyzing. Sight only comes by the light of God coming in; and when once it has come, there is no longer need to ask if a thing is right or wrong. We know!
You remember again how in Psalm 139:23 the writer says ‘Search me, O God, and know my heart.’ You realize, do you not, what it means to say ‘Search me?’ It certainly does not mean that I search myself. ‘Search me’ means ‘You search me!’ That is the way of illumination. It is for God to come in and search; it is not for me to search. Of course, that will never mean that I may go blindly on, careless of my true condition. That is not the point. The point is that however much my self-examination may reveal in me that needs putting right, such searching never really gets below the surface. My true knowledge of self comes not from my searching myself but from God searching me.
What does it mean in practice for us to come into the light? How does it work? How do we see light in His light? Here again, the Psalmist comes to our help. ‘The opening up of Your words gives light, giving understanding to the simple’ (Psalm 119:130). In spiritual things, we are all simple. We are dependent upon God to give us understanding, especially in the matter of our own nature. And it is here that the Word of God operates. It is the Word of God, the penetrating Scripture of truth, that settles our questions. It is that which discerns our motives and defines for us their true source in soul or spirit.
Light comes in and we see light. The light of God brings us to see the light concerning ourselves, and it is an abiding principle that every knowledge of self comes to us in that way. Light has one law; it shines wherever it is admitted. That is the only requirement. We may shut it out of ourselves; it fears nothing else. If we throw ourselves open to God, He will reveal. The trouble comes when we have closed areas, locked and barred places in our hearts, where we think with pride that we are right. Our defeat then lies less in our being wrong than in our not knowing that we are wrong. Wrong may be a question of natural strength; ignorance of it is a question of light. You can see the natural strength in some but they cannot see it themselves. Oh, we need to be sincere and humble, and to open ourselves before God. Those who are open can see. God is light, and we cannot live in His light and be without understanding. ‘Send forth Your light and Your truth. Let them lead me, let them bring me to your set-apart mountain. And to Your dwelling places.’ (Psalm 43:3)
There is one thing that must be touched, and that is the very life of the man, not merely his sins. The question of his soul power, his driving force, lies still at the heart of things. To make everything of sin, or even of the flesh in its more obvious manifestations, is still to be on the surface. You have not yet got to the root of the problem.
Adam did not let sin into the world by committing murder. That came later. Adam let in sin by choosing to have his soul developed to a place where he could go on by himself apart from God. When, therefore, God secures for His glory that race of men who will be the instrument of His purpose in the universe, they will be a people whose life – yes, whose very breath – is dependent upon Him. He will be the tree of life to them.
We should not be forever looking within and asking ‘Now, is this soul or is it spirit?’ that will never get us anywhere; it is darkness. No Scripture shows us how the Saints were brought to self-knowledge. It was always by light from God, and the light is God Himself.
We can never know either the hatefulness of sin or the treachery of our self-nature until there is that flash of God upon us. I speak not of a sensation but of our inward revelation of the Lord Himself through His Word. Such a breaking in of divine light does for us what doctrine alone can never do.
Christ is our light; and He is the Living Word. As we read the Scriptures, that life in Him brings revelation. ‘The life was the light of men’ (John 1:4). Such illumination may not come to us all at once, but gradually; but it will be more and more clear and searching, until we see ourselves in the light of God and all our self-confidence is gone.
In the next lesson, we shall seek to examine an aspect of the work of the Cross which meets and deals with the problem of our human soul.