The Holy City

This item requires carefulness while reading it. Read it with your heart.Do not put it away if it stands as a provocation in the mental realm.It will do you much good in the spiritual realm.THE HOLY CITY, NEW JERUSALEMby T. Austin-Sparks First published in “A Witness and A Testimony” magazines, Nov-Dec 1966 (Volume 44-6) through May-June 1968 (Volume 46-3), from messages given at the Aeschi (Switzerland) Conference in September, 1966.Chapter OneThe Nature of God“And there came one of the seven angels... and he spake with me, saying, Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the wife of the Lamb. And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and shewed me the holy city Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Revelation 21:9,10). “Ye are come unto mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” (Hebrews 12:22). “But the Jerusalem that is above is free, which is our mother” (Galatians 4:26). We are going to occupy the first part of our time with trying to see where we are, and those passages do tell us quite precisely where we are. The Word says: “Ye are come unto... the heavenly Jerusalem”, and that “the Jerusalem that is above” (that is, the heavenly Jerusalem) “is our mother”. Well, that says where we are, but it does not explain, and this week we are going to be occupied with that to which we have come. Now when you read these last chapters of the book of the Revelation you are inclined to think that it is all in the future. “The holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” - surely that belongs to some future time? Well, it may have a future aspect, but these Scriptures say that we have come there already. I know that that sounds rather mysterious, but in these hours which we spend together I think we shall be seeing exactly what it means. At the beginning, then, we must lay the foundation for our studies. WHY WERE THESE CHAPTERS WRITTEN?First of all, we must understand why it was, and when it was, that the Apostle John wrote all this about the new Jerusalem. This was written at a time when Christians were undergoing very severe persecution. The great wave of persecution of the Christians was proceeding, and Christianity was being subjected to very strong opposition from this world, so that Christians were finding that it was a matter of very great cost to be faithful to the Lord Jesus. As you know, the Apostle John himself, who wrote this, was in exile on the isle of Patmos for the testimony of Jesus. That very first thing makes these chapters very contemporary. A new wave of persecution of Christianity has already begun on this earth, and it is spreading from the east to the west. While we are here in this place quite a number of the Lord’s servants are in prison for the testimony of Jesus. So this book does not just relate to something which happened centuries ago, nor to the future, but we are going to see that it has a very real application to our own time. The second thing about the writing of this vision of the heavenly Jerusalem was that it was written in a time when the churches were losing their first love. A change was coming over them, and the first chapters of this book show us what that change was. The first love, the first life, the first glory were being lost. Surely we all realize how true that is in many places in our own time! The great cry today is: ’Let us get back to the things of the beginning!’ The third thing that led to the writing of these chapters was this: It was a time when many false prophets and teachers were bringing confusion into Christianity, and the faith which was ’once for all delivered unto the saints’ was losing its purity. One Apostle, who wrote a very short letter, said he was constrained to write in order ”to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3). Is that not another condition in which we are living today? Many false teachers are bringing the people of God into confusion so that they hardly know what to believe. Perhaps there is no book in the Bible which is more confused than this book of the Revelation. Many Christians have given up reading it, saying: ’I don’t know what to think about it. This Bible teacher gives this interpretation, while that one gives another.’ If I tried to do so, I could not tell you how many different interpretations of the book of the Revelation there are! Well, that is how it was in the time when John wrote. You know that in his Letter he said that many false Christs had arisen (1 John 2:18). We must remember that this revelation of the heavenly Jerusalem was given because of all these conditions. But let us note one more thing. This book was written at a time when judgment upon this world was beginning. You have only to read through it to see the judgments that were coming upon the world, and they began at the earthly Jerusalem. I think there is nothing in literature so terrible as the account of the destruction of Jerusalem given by the historian Josephus! But when the earthly Jerusalem is destroyed and removed, the heavenly one comes into view. The judgment upon this world began at Jerusalem, and then it came upon the Roman Empire, and upon Rome itself. The time was not far ahead when great and wonderful imperial Rome would be devastated. From all its wealth, its luxury and its plenty it was reduced to famine and pestilence, and the economic situation became so bad that the most wealthy people were begging for food. And so you read in this book of these pestilences, famines and wars, and all these conditions which were coming upon the world. The judgments of God upon this world were beginning - and who shall say that those judgments are not beginning in our world today? We leave that for the present. So we have here conditions of suffering and corruption and loss of glory, the decline of the Lord’s people from their first love, a state of falsehood and spiritual weakness - and when things were like that, and are like that, the heavenly Jerusalem is presented and is the answer to all those conditions. It is just exactly the opposite of all those things. Now we leave that for the moment and move nearer to the heart of these last chapters in the book of the Revelation.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?We want to know what is the meaning of this holy city, and I think that before we get very much further many of your ideas are going to be thoroughly upset! We are going to spoil many of the hymns that you sing, but we are going to have something better, and I hope that you will be singing a new song before we have finished. The Christian who takes his, or her, Christian life seriously is always seeking for something which will explain his experience. Such Christians may not be actually searching for this, but in their hearts they are asking for something which will explain everything. In our Christian lives we are asking: What does it all mean? What is it leading to? Men in the world are asking the question: What does it all mean? When I was in hospital some years ago there was a man who had both his legs amputated, and I heard him groaning in his bed almost every day: ’What does it all mean?’ You remember that in the eighth chapter of his letter to the Romans the Apostle Paul speaks about the groaning creation - ”the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together” (verse 22) - and if you put your ear to the groaning creation, what do you hear? I feel sure you would hear this: What does it all mean? And then the Apostle Paul goes on to say: ”We ourselves groan within ourselves” (verse 23). We have a deep question in our hearts: What does it all mean? What does all this difficulty, trial and suffering in the Christian life mean? What is it all leading to? Now, of course, it is the business of the Christian teacher to provide the answer to that question and so to help God’s people to understand what it means. So we have to ask this question: Is there an explanation which can be found in the Bible which will provide us with light upon the way?

QOUTE;A change was coming over them, and the first chapters of this book show us what that change was. The first love, the first life, the first glory were being lost. Surely we all realize how true that is in many places in our own time! The great cry today is: ’Let us get back to the things of the beginning!’ QUESTION;Does it all boil down to the Heart the New Heart spoken off in Ezekiel? This is what the Lord has been showing me.

Quote;”We ourselves groan within ourselves” (verse 23). We have a deep question in our hearts: What does it all mean? What does all this difficulty, trial and suffering in the Christian life mean? What is it all leading to? Now, of course, it is the business of the Christian teacher to provide the answer to that question and so to help God’s people to understand what it means. So we have to ask this question: Is there an explanation which can be found in the Bible which will provide us with light upon the way? I can relate to this!

What happened in these churches was a process in which spiritual maturity was quenched, the new heart denied right to develop and the work of the Spirit bluntly stopped by earthly desires and rulings.Lars W.

Thank You, for your quick response.Quote;The Christian who takes his, or her, Christian life seriously is always seeking for something which will explain his experience.

THE KEY TO EVERYTHING I want to say that there is an explanation, and I think these last chapters of the Bible are the best explanation in the Bible. If only we understood these two last chapters a great light would break upon our hearts, and we would say: ’And now I see. I have the key to everything.’ Now that is making a great claim for two chapters - the key to everything! I am not just using words. I have dwelt upon this for many days and weeks, so that these are not just empty words. What is the explanation of everything? There is one thing which governs everything in the Bible, and it is that which comes out in fullness in the last chapters. What is that key to everything? When I put it into a short phrase, of course, you will not grasp what it means, but the more you think about it the more you will see that it is true. The thing which governs everything in the Bible from beginning to end is the nature of God. Have you got that phrase? The nature of God governs everything, and by ’the nature of God’ we mean the very constitution of God Himself. We say about people: ’Well, he, or she, is constituted that way. That is how he thinks, how he feels and how he speaks, and because he is made like that, he speaks and thinks like that. That is just his constitution.’ It does not matter what you do, you cannot get away from your own constitution. It is your constitution that makes you behave as you do. That is what we mean by ’the nature of God’. If I may put it in this way: It is just how God, because He is what He is, looks at everything. Well now, one of the real lessons of our Christian life is that we learn that God looks at everything quite differently from ourselves. He looks at things from the eyes of His own nature. If anything satisfies the nature of God His eyes fill with life, and He says: ”In whom I am well pleased”, but if anything does not satisfy the nature of God and He does not accept it, His eyes become dark. God judges everything according to His own nature, and He decides everything according to His own nature. The value of anything is always decided by God as to how it answers to His nature. God determines destiny for eternity on the standard of His own nature. Is that too difficult for you to grasp? You will never understand this city until you understand that, and you will never understand why Jesus Christ came into the world until you understand that. God is deciding the destiny of this world from the standpoint of His own nature, and His Son Jesus Christ is His standard of decision. There is one question which stands over everything, and that is: Does it satisfy the nature of God? The Bible begins with the FACT of God and ends with the NATURE of God in perfect expression, and this perfect expression of God’s mind and nature is presented to us in the symbolism of a city and a garden. Do you notice the word that I have used? The SYMBOLISM of a city and a garden - and this is where we upset your hymns and you have to have an absolute revolution in your mentality. Have you the idea that you are going to the heavenly Jerusalem as to some thing and some place? I am sorry to tell you that you are wrong! When you sing: “Jerusalem the golden!With milk and honey blest,”What do you mean? When you sing:”We’re marching upward to Zion”What do you mean? When you sing:”We shall tread the streets of gold”What do you mean? When you speak about ”drinking at the river” and ”taking of the fruit of life”, what do you mean? If I did not see the real meaning I should be very sorry to spoil all your lovely pictures! There is no such thing as a literal new Jerusalem and there is no such thing as a literal heavenly city answering to John’s vision, but there is something very much better, and that is what we have to consider more fully.

WHY THIS SYMBOLISM?I will just close by telling you why all this book of the Revelation, especially the last chapters, was written in symbolic terms. This book throughout is almost entirely symbolism. Why? Because so much of it was not only prophetic as to a more distant future but had to do with the history of those times. Supposing that, instead of speaking about a great dragon or a terrible beast coming up out of the sea, John had said: ‘Caesar is an awful dragon and wild beast. Caesar is like THAT.’ Well, you know what would have happened! So these historic truths were presented in symbols, and the Christians understood. You know that Peter called Rome ‘Babylon’. Well, the Romans, in reading that, would have said: ‘Oh, he is talking about Babylon. Where is Babylon?’, but the Christians understood that Peter’s Babylon was Rome. So it was all written in symbols and the Christians were the only ones who understood, and that is true of the holy city. It is not something literal; it is something which represents something spiritual, and it is for Christians to understand that this is not some imagination but some SPIRITUAL reality. The Lord Jesus said to His disciples: ”Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God: but to the rest in parables” (Luke 8:10). That is: You understand, they don’t. So these chapters are for spiritual understanding. This city, this heavenly Jerusalem, is that which fully answers to the nature of God. Every detail about it represents something of the Divine nature, so the writer of the letter to the Hebrews says to Christians: ”Ye are come unto... the HEAVENLY Jerusalem.” Now that introduction was very necessary. It might not be very inspiring at the moment, but we must understand what it is that we are having to deal with, and why this has such an important message for our own lives and our own times. If you forget all that I have said this morning, try to remember one thing and take it away with you, think about it and keep on thinking about it: All God’s work in our lives is on the basis of His own nature. We are called to be ”partakers of the Divine nature”, and when God has finished with us - if we let Him have His way - we shall be a full expression of the nature of God. Then, when you have a great multitude of people like THAT, a full, living expression of God’s heart, then you have the heavenly Jerusalem. Now you can sing again, if you like, ”We are marching to Zion”, but be sure of what you mean!

THE HOLY CITY, NEW JERUSALEMby T. Austin-Sparks Chapter TwoTHE NATURE OF THE CITYWe are engaged upon a consideration of the last chapters of the book of the Revelation, especially with those parts that deal with the new Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven. In that connection will you look at three verses of Scripture in the Letter to the Hebrews: “By faith he (Abraham) became a sojourner in the land of promise, as in a land not his own, dwelling in tents, with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: for he looked for the city which hath the foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (11:9,10).“But ye are come unto mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” (12:22). “For we have not here an abiding city, but we seek after the city which is to come” (13:14). Before we continue with our consideration of this city I do want to say a very serious word about the purpose of these meditations. I want to say to you that this is not just a subject for a conference, nor just some Bible study for a series of meetings. My own strong conviction is that this is a word from God in this serious time in which we are living, and we are living in the most serious time in the history of this world. If we knew what was happening in the nations of this whole world today, one question would fill our minds: How much longer can it go on? Things are happening which make it very possible that many alive today will see the great change in this whole world. We are not exaggerating if we say that it is quite possible that within the next twenty or twenty-five years the end of this present world order could come. That would mean that this could happen in the lifetime of the middle-aged people, and certainly of younger people. It is not my desire to be an alarmist, but what I have just said is very possible, and so many things are happening in the world as to make the time very short.I am not prophesying, so no one will be able to say that I was a false prophet if it does not happen! I am only saying that it is very possible, and if this is true, then we might expect that God would send a message to His people to prepare them. So I repeat: this is not just some bit of Bible teaching for a week. This could be a message from the Lord to prepare us for what is coming very soon. Now I must take you back to the main thing which we said earlier, because that is the thing which is right at the centre of everything else. It is that the thing which governs everything in the history of this world is the nature of God. When God created this world He created it to be an expression of His own nature, so that wherever you looked you could see what God is like. When God created man He intended him to be an expression of Himself. He, said: ”Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26), which just means that when man is as God meant him to be, we should see what God is like. When He finished that creation He said ”it was very good” (Genesis 1:31), and when you think of what God is like, for Him to be able to say ’It is very good’ of anything, it means that it really must satisfy His nature. Then everything went away from God and became displeasing to Him. When He looked out in the world He could not see His nature being expressed, so He put a curse upon everything. In effect, He said: ’That no longer satisfies My nature. I do not want it.’ From that time onward God was always seeking to find something that would satisfy His nature. That is the story of the Old Testament - it is just the story of that which does satisfy God and that which does not satisfy God. And God accepts or rejects just according to how far His nature is satisfied. It is a long story; but running through that long history was one golden line, like a golden thread in a black fabric.

ABRAHAM’S QUEST It is a long history. It reaches right back to the beginning, and then it was taken up by Abraham, who, it says, ”by faith... looked for a city” - now note - ”whose builder and maker is GOD”. Not a city built by sinful man. However wonderful such a city might be, it would never satisfy God. It had to be a city which satisfied the nature of its Maker, God. That vision was put into the heart of Abraham, and he could say: ’Somehow I have come to understand that God wants a city, and if He wants anything, it will have to be like Him, and be made by Him. It is a ”city whose builder and maker is God”.’ So we have read that Abraham went up and down the land, and as he did so he saw some cities. He saw the city of Sodom, and said: ’No, that is not it. That could never satisfy God.’ Then he saw the city of Gomorrah. ’No.’ said he, ’that is not the one.’ And then he saw the city of Salem, the original Jerusalem. ’Now this is very much better than Sodom and Gomorrah,’ but the Spirit said to Abraham: ’No, not even that one.’ So he went on moving up and down the land, and this Divine conception of the city never materialized. Seventy years, eighty years, ninety years... and then he died, and he never found the city! This Letter to the Hebrews says: ”These all died in faith, not having received the promises... God having provided some better thing for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect” (11:13,40).

THE END OF THE QUEST And then this same Letter says: ”But ye ARE come... unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.” It has been a very long spiritual pilgrimage, but it is at an end now. Abraham has got it now. He is a co-inheritor with us. Yet once more we have to change our ideas. There is a long, long story of Jerusalem in the Old Testament, but that Jerusalem, even in its best days, never finally satisfied God’s nature. Everybody who knows his or her New Testament knows this. Have you read Peter, Paul, John and Stephen? They very largely make up the New Testament, and everybody knows from them that the things in the Old Testament were only patterns of some spiritual thing in the New Testament. Read Peter’s Letters again, and there you will find that he is speaking of God’s new Israel, and the NEW House of God in Israel. He calls it ”God’s spiritual house”, and speaks of the offering of ”SPIRITUAL sacrifices”. This is the new Israel. Read Paul again, and you will find him writing to the Galatians: ”Now this Hagar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to the Jerusalem that now is: for she is in bondage with her children. But the Jerusalem that is above is free, which is our mother” (4:25,26). And then he will say in his Letter to the Philippians: ”Our citizenship is in heaven; from whence also we wait for a Saviour” (3:20). That is the transition from the earthly to the heavenly, from the temporal to the spiritual. You know, John builds his Gospel around Jerusalem; that is, the Gospel by John is centred in and circles around the Jerusalem which is below, but when you move on to the book of the Revelation, written by the same man, the centre is the heavenly Jerusalem. He is walking around her, noting her walls. In these two great writings John has moved from the earthly to the heavenly. And then this wonderful Letter to the Hebrews says that we, the believers of this dispensation, ”are come unto mount Zion... the heavenly Jerusalem”. But, you see, this is all spiritual language. It is that of a spiritual character which God is seeking to possess. Well, let us say it again, very strongly: This is only symbolism. What does it really mean? It just means what all the Bible is about: God is going to find His full satisfaction in His Son, and in a people conformed to the image of His Son. It is not a thing, nor a place - it is the Son of God and the sons whom He is bringing to glory.

THE PRESENT PREPARATION Let us bring that city right here. Dear friends, if you are really a born again child of God, you are a part of the city which God is now building. God is now building something, and this building is going on inside of us - or it ought to be! God is, by His Spirit, building His Son into us. Christ is being built up in us, and we are being built up into Christ. This is a tremendous business! When we are born again the Holy Spirit gets hold of these pieces of rough stone - and what poor bits of humanity we are! What poor pieces of material we are for a heavenly city! We have a lot of corners, like a piece of stone, and the Holy Spirit says: ’We will knock off some of those corners,’ and so our spiritual experience is one of having the corners knocked off. You know what I mean by ’corners’! If you don’t think that you have any corners, you know that other people have! We are very awkward people and do not fit in anywhere, so we have to be made to fit into this heavenly city. You see, this heavenly city is very practical. It is all very well to sing about ’Jerusalem the golden’, but when the Holy Spirit is knocking off the corners, that is not what we mean when we sing. The symbolism may be very wonderful, but the actuality is through suffering. But when the work is finished we will say: ’God has done a wonderful thing in me. What a difficult person I was! How difficult it was for me to fit in with others! Indeed, I often wanted to run right away from everyone because I did not fit in, but God has done His work faithfully. All the awkward corners have gone and Jerusalem is a city that is ”compact together”.’ Do you remember those words from Psalm 122? ”Jerusalem, that art builded as a city that is compact together” (verse 3). and Peter says: ”Ye also, as living stones, are built up a spiritual house” (1 Peter 2:5). Yes, God is building His city. Not only are we people with corners: we are people with a very rough surface, and when we rub up against one another there is a lot of friction. You know what I mean! We just do not get on smoothly together, and then the Holy Spirit takes the sandpaper to smooth us down. But, oh no, He does not take a piece of paper and rub us smooth - He puts us up against someone else who is not smooth, or He puts us in a situation in life which is not smooth. We want to get away from that person because he, or she, rubs us up the wrong way, and we want to get away from that situation because it does rub us up the wrong way so much. We want to have a smooth time, but the Holy Spirit does not let us have it. We shall never have a smooth time until we are smooth - and do you know what it is that makes us smooth? It is the grace of God in suffering. We have to say a lot about that when we further consider the city. Now you have got away from symbolism, have you not? We have come to spiritual reality! And this city is just the embodiment of these spiritual principles.

BUILDING FOR ETERNITY When you are talking about the heavenly Jerusalem you are talking about something eternal, and that is something of which we are very conscious now. Here again we have come into the realm of what is spiritual and not temporal. The point is this: What God is doing in the small fragment of time in our lives is going to be revealed to His glory for all eternity. To use the words of the Apostle Paul: ”Our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory” (2 Corinthians 4:17). God is doing in these little lives that which will correspond to the city ”coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God”. I do trust that you are already beginning to see what God is working at, and what He is now building for all eternity. So we cease to think of the city as a place, and think of it as a people conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. ”Partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).

THE HOLY CITY, NEW JERUSALEM”by T. Austin-Sparks Chapter ThreeCOMING TO THE CITYUp till now we have been making our way toward the city. Now we arrive, so I want you to open your Bibles at the twenty-first chapter of the Book of the Revelation:”And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband” (verse 2). ”And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and shewed me the holy city Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God; her light was like unto a stone most precious, clear as crystal” (verses 10,11). As we have contemplated this city of God we have been breaking our way through the symbolism to the spiritual reality, and I hope that now we have succeeded in realizing that we are not considering some THING, or some PLACE, but that this is only a symbolic representation of Jesus Christ and His Church. In this presentation at the end of the Bible we see what God is working toward: bringing the fullness of His Son into His Church for final manifestation. That is the explanation of the Christian life, and there is no other explanation. It begins with Christ, it goes on with the increase of Christ, and it ends with the fullness of Christ. Now I trust that we are quite clear about that. We need to have our minds converted, and that conversion has to be from the imagination to the reality, from the symbolism to the spiritual meaning. You know, in this western world where everything is so practical, THAT conversion is a very big thing! So we are not thinking about some time, some place, some thing, called the New Jerusalem, but about the Lord Jesus Christ becoming more and more full in the Church, until that day of fullness and glory comes when what has been done is manifested in the whole universe. So we come now right to the city. That is, let me repeat, to Jesus Christ and His Church represented here in the terms of the new Jerusalem. Now there are four words that we have just read upon which we want to put our finger: ”He carried me away in the Spirit” First, then: ”IN THE SPIRIT”.”The new Jerusalem”... and the word is ”NEW”.”OUT OF HEAVEN” is the third.And the fourth: ”HAVING THE GLORY OF GOD”.I trust you have those four things. I shall begin with the last.

HAVING THE GLORY OF GOD What is the glory of God? We know quite well from John’s other writings that the glory of God was in His Son, Jesus Christ, and we also know, especially from the Apostle Paul, that the Church is to be the vessel of that glory: ”Unto him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus unto all the ages for ever and ever” (Ephesians 3:21). But those are statements of truth. They do not define or explain anything, or tell us what the glory of God is, and it is important for us to understand what it is. Let us remind ourselves that it is that word ’glory’ which governs everything where God is concerned. The one thing that God had in view from the creation, and right through the Old Testament, was His own glory. When we open our New Testament and find God’s Son present in this world, we hear the Apostle saying: ”And we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father” (John 1:14). Again we ask: What is the glory of God? The glory of God is the absolute satisfaction of the Divine nature, when God is able to say, really from His very nature and all that He is, ’I am well pleased with that. That perfectly satisfies My very nature.’ If you and I were in the presence of that Divine satisfaction we should feel a tremendous joy, and would just exclaim: ’Oh, this is glory!’ Let us consider this in the opposite way. What is it that robs our lives and our hearts of glory? What is it that makes us sing about the great day when ”that will be glory for me”? What is it that makes us long for the glory? I can tell you quite simply. The glory in our hearts and in our lives is limited because of our consciousness of how unlike the Lord we are. Oh, how different our natures are from God’s! That worries us every day and hides the glory in our hearts. We live so little in God’s satisfaction and so much in our own dissatisfaction. We have not yet come to really grasp the great truth of our justification in Christ Jesus, nor have we come to understand that what God is doing with us is to change us from what we are into what He is. I am going to be very simple for a minute or two. When you first come to the Lord Jesus you have a wonderful sense of glory. You do not understand all the teaching about coming to the Lord Jesus, but you just come and give yourself to Him, and take Him to be your Lord, and something happens almost immediately. A great burden rolls away from your heart. A great cloud is removed from your life and you have to say: ’Oh, this is wonderful! This is glory!’ Why is that? Because there is One who knows a great deal more of what it means than you do. The Holy Spirit has come to lead every one of us to that final glory, and this is the beginning. He says: ’I have got him - or her - on the road to glory,’ and so He registers glory in our hearts. All the meaning of justification by faith - that is, being made righteous in Christ - is in that first step, and so God the Holy Spirit says at the beginning: ’I am well-pleased.’ The heart and the nature of God are satisfied, and, without a great deal of teaching, you just know it. Glory is just that wonderful sense, or sensation, of God being well-pleased. The pathway of the child of God is intended to be the pathway of glory. The Holy Spirit has taken possession.

IN THE SPIRIT The Holy Spirit has taken charge. Now, after you have taken the first step and tasted something of the glory, you will come into a situation, or a temptation, where the whole question of the glory is involved. There is something in your life upon which the Holy Spirit puts His finger and says, in effect: ’That belongs to the world you have left behind, so you must leave it behind. Now, what about it? What are you going to do about it? Are you going to hold on to it, or are you going to let it go?’ The continuation of the glory depends upon your decision. If you hold on, and do not let go, that glory of the Divine satisfaction will be clouded. A cloud will come over your heart, and people who saw you when you first came to the Lord will say: ’Something has happened. The light has gone out of his - or her - face.’ And then you have a big battle, and if you get through it and let the Lord have His way fully, some of the old glory will come back and you will feel: ’Oh, the burden has rolled away.’ Those of us who have gone on with the Lord through the years have had many battles. We have had to come to new positions as to the will of God, and as long as the issue was not settled it seemed as though the glory was lifted up and waiting for something, but when we have fought that issue through and got clear with the Lord, the glory has come back. Perhaps the biggest battles will come at the end - this book of the Revelation says so - but then, through the last and greatest of all battles, we come right through into the eternal glory: that is, we come to the place where God’s nature is fully satisfied with His work in us. Do you understand the meaning of glory now? Glory is a wonderful influence of God in our lives. We shall see that all the way through our meditations, ”Having the glory of God”. What an influence it is when the glory of God is in our hearts! You see a little child who is absolutely satisfied and delighted with everything, and don’t you like to be where that little child is? That has a wonderful influence upon you! Put it the other way - a little child who is discontented with everything. What a miserable effect that has upon you! I heard of such a little child. It was bed time and mother said: ’Darling, it is time for bed. Put your dolls away.’ The little child said: ’I don’t want to put my dolls away.’ The mother saw that she was going to do nothing with the child, so she said: ’Well, would you like to play with your dolls for a little longer?’ ’I don’t want to play with my dolls any longer!’ Poor mother did not know what to say next! So she said: ’Well, darling, you just do what you want to do.’ And the little child said: ’I don’t want to do what I want to do!’ Poor mother! What a miserable time for her! There is no glory in that! But when God’s nature is fully satisfied and we come into harmony with that nature, there is glory in our hearts. Do you see that the Holy Spirit is trying to produce in us that which satisfies the heart of God? It is perhaps a hard school. It means much discipline, and much testing of our love for the Lord. It constantly raises the question as to whether we really want the Lord to be well-pleased with us, but this life is the school of those who are to be the sons of God dwelling in His glory. So you see how two things are joined together: ”In the Spirit... having the glory of God.” Be out of the Spirit and you are out of the glory, because, as you know, one of the names of the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of glory. That means that the whole purpose and work of the Holy Spirit is to bring us to glory, to the satisfaction of God.

NEW Now we have two other words left. ”In the Spirit I saw the NEW Jerusalem.” That is only a symbolic way of saying that you have to be under the government of the Holy Spirit if you are going to see God’s new things. One of the characteristic words of the New Testament is this word ’New’: ’In Christ Jesus there is a NEW creation... In Christ Jesus there is a NEW man... In Christ Jesus there is a NEW life... In Christ Jesus there is a NEW way of life’, and so you lift that word out from your New Testament until you come to the end, and it says: ”A NEW heaven and a NEW earth” (Revelation 21:1), and then ”the NEW Jerusalem”. The word ’new’ has no meaning unless there is something old. It is a comparison and a contrast. There was an old Jerusalem, but it has gone. It has been put away under judgment, and when the old is put away, the new is introduced. We have yet to see the meaning of the city of Jerusalem, but for the moment it is just this word ’new’ with which we are concerned. It is something completely fresh, and there is something about it that has never been true of anything before. When you consider the history of the old Jerusalem, what a sad and tragic story it is! And it is a tragic story because of its sin. It had its days of glory, but they were very few. The glory soon departed and the tragedy is written through the Old Testament. The last words for that Jerusalem were pronounced by the Lord Jesus: ”O Jerusalem, Jerusalem,... how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens, under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate” (Matthew 23:37,38), and two thousand years have told the story of that desolation. This NEW people that God is bringing into being is just the opposite of the old Jerusalem. This is something which is called ”unto his ETERNAL glory” (1 Peter 5:10). This is something which is not called unto tragedy at the end, but glory; something over which all the powers of evil are not going to prevail, as they did over the old Jerusalem. This is a NEW Jerusalem. Now I must just very briefly touch on the other thing, upon which we shall enlarge later in the week.

OUT OF HEAVEN Of course, if you just use your imagination, you do not know what that means. You begin to think of some great object called a city descending out of heaven. Dear friends, we shall not have gone much further before we shall see that that is absolutely impossible. You hold that for a little while I try to explain this, but I shall remind you more than once of what I have just said about the impossibility of it being a literal city. If this is going to come down out of heaven, it must be there before it can come down. What does this mean? The Apostle Paul tells us that the Church is seated together with Christ in the heavenlies now (Ephesians 2:6), but we might answer: ’We are not in heaven; we are very much on this earth. Everything down here is much more real than things in heaven.’ Are you quite sure that you are right? Is that really true? What is the very first thing that comes into your consciousness when you are born again? It is: ’I do not belong to this world any more. Something has happened to me which has separated me from it. Things in this world are different now, and the things that were once my life are no longer my life. The things which I once sought after I now no longer want. The people who were once my true friends are no longer my true friends. My true friends are now the people of God, and my true family is the family of God. What has happened to me? They say that I am ”born again”, but when they say that they do not put it right. What the Bible says is ”born from above”.’ You know, if you have been born, and have spent your childhood, in a certain place, there is a strange link between you and that place in your life. Now, I spent much of my childhood and my schooldays in a certain place, and somehow, through all the years, I have wanted to go back to that place again and again, so, from time to time, I have gone back. But, oh! how everything has changed! All the old friends have gone, all the old scenes have changed, and I do not think they have changed for the better. Sometimes when I have left that place I have said: ‘I will never go back again!’, but wait a year or two, and I am back again. I cannot keep away. There is some pull inside. Do you see what I mean? If we really have been born from above there will always be a pull away from below. We may have some bad times, and we may be tempted to give it all up, but somehow or other we just do go on. “I was in the Spirit... and I saw the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven.” The most powerful work of the Holy Spirit in a life is to make that life know that it belongs to heaven and not to this world. I expect most of us know what is meant by this. Paul says: “Our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20), and the Psalmist says: “This one was born THERE” (Psalm 87:4). We do not belong to this world, and we ought to know it. If we can settle down and be satisfied with this world, then we know nothing about the work of the Holy Spirit. He is the Spirit sent down from heaven to link us with heaven. Well, that is what it means to come to the new Jerusalem. It is not just an abstract idea, nor a symbolic imagination, but a powerful reality in the life. We are not going to the city: we ARE the city.

THE HOLY CITY, NEW JERUSALEM”by T. Austin-Sparks Chapter FourIN THE SPIRIT OR IN THE WORLD? ”And there came one of the seven angels... and he spake with me, saying, Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the wife of the Lamb. And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and shewed me the holy city Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God: her light was like unto a stone most precious, ...clear as crystal” (Revelation 21:9-11).There are those people who think that I am wrongly spiritualizing everything, and they say that I am wrong when I say that this city is not a literal city, but represents a spiritual people. But I hold to my position! One would think that it only needs one phrase here to justify that position. The angel said to John: ”Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the wife of the Lamb,” and when he got John there, there was no wife or bride at all: he showed him a city. And there is so much more like that in this book. There was a time when there was a book sealed without and within, and John wept because there was no one who could open it. The angel said: ”Weep not: behold, the Lion that is of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath overcome, to open the book...” (Revelation 5:5). And when John turned to see this Lion: ”I saw... a Lamb” (verse 6). Well, what is there in common between a lion and a lamb? You can only explain it if you get the spiritual principles. I think it is worth while taking just a few minutes on this particular point, especially for the Bible students, but, of course, for everybody. It is essential that we really understand the particular form that John’s ministry took, and this was his method more than of anyone else in the New Testament. John was most concerned with the spiritual meaning which lay behind material things. You know how true that was in his Gospel - everybody will accept this principle in his Gospel! He called all the miracles of Jesus ’signs’, and did not just say: ’Now this is something that Jesus DID’ but: ’This is what Jesus MEANT when He did that.’ When Jesus turned the water into wine, John meant it to teach us that Jesus can give us an altogether new kind of life. When the old wine - or life - fails and disappoints us, Jesus can give a new life. When Jesus raised a poor man from his bed after he had been there, unable to walk, for thirty-eight years, John says: ’That is a sign.’ Jesus can take a poor moral and spiritual cripple and put him on his feet: He can give him the power to walk in a new kind of life. When Jesus gave sight to the man who was born blind, John says: ’That is a sign: a sign that Jesus can give us a new sight so that we can see spiritual things that we never saw before.’ And so it is with all the eight signs in the Gospel by John.

You accept that in John’s Gospel and say: ’Now these things in the natural world are signs of something in the spiritual world.’ But if you accept that in his Gospel, why will you not accept it in his book of the Revelation? This city, the new Jerusalem, is a sign of something else. Every part of it signifies something spiritual, something in relation to the Lord Jesus. Do you accept that? If you do, we can go on. We come again to this tenth verse of chapter twenty-one: ”And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and shewed me the holy city Jerusalem.” Well, ”a mountain great and high”, and ”he carried me away IN THE SPIRIT”. In spiritual terms that just means that John was alive in the spirit. Do you think that this angel took hold of the Apostle John when he was on the Isle of Patmos and lifted him right away to some great high mountain? There would have been trouble in Patmos if that had happened! The Roman authorities would have been saying: ’John has escaped!’ Do you see what I mean? This was a spiritual experience. It may have been a dream, or a vision. You know that in our dreams we can travel a long way. I have sometimes dreamt that I was in America, and then I have awakened a few minutes afterward and found that I was still in London, but I had been travelling a very long way. You will accept that in the natural. Why will you not accept it in the spiritual?