by T. Austin-Sparks
Transcribed from a message given by T. Austin-Sparks in April 1959.
The spoken form has been retained verbatim.
The spoken form has been retained verbatim.
"Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things that were heard lest haply we drift away from them."
If you know anything about this letter at all, you know that it is the great letter of spiritual crisis. The writer compares what he has to say with the crisis of Israel at Kadesh Barnea where they came after so long a period of instruction, to the point where it was all to mature into the realization of its purpose or all to fade out so far as they were concerned and they miss it all. This writer gives quite a lot of his message to that particular application. Indeed we would all agree that that was a very great crisis in the life and history of Israel. And this letter really circles round a spiritual crisis comparable to that.
As you know, there is here throughout, the blending of two dominant notes; one of warning, the other of exhortation. Nine times in the letter we have this warning note: “Lest”. Lest... it begins in the verse that we have just read, “Lest haply we drift away” and then it goes right on to chapter twelve. The other note which is struck ten times through the letter is “Let us”. “Let us… Lest”.
It’s not our intention to trace the warning and the exhortation through the letter but just to note the fact that it is a crisis which continually arises in the history of the Lord’s people. It arose as we have seen with Israel in the wilderness. Here, quite evidently, it had arisen at the time of the writing of this letter; a very serious crisis indeed for those to whom the letter was written. And it’s the kind of crisis that arises from time to time and it just amounts to this: taking this first verse of chapter two, there has been a deposit, there has been much given, the Lord has revealed Himself to His people. Now, after a period, a sufficient period, a period of probation and of testing in relation to that, the question arises: Are we going right on into the full meaning and value and realization of all that He has given or are we going to drift away, to fail to enter in? It's something that the Lord presses periodically. It came with Israel after forty years of testing in the wilderness. It’s a point of interest that most probably this letter was written about forty years after the Lord Jesus commenced to present all that we have here in chapter one, in the incarnation in His presence in this world.
It was a crisis and the crisis had two particular points, one, as to all that the Lord had given which He would never allow to just pass without some very real effort, some entreaty, some warning that all that He meant could be missed. The other, the fact that very near to the time of the writing of this letter was Israel’s own great crisis. If the letter was written as we have suggested, somewhere about the year 60AD or in the sixties, we know that it was 70AD when Israel and Jerusalem were completely shattered and scattered over the earth by the Roman destruction of their city, their country. And their temple and all that it represented, the synagogues - these were to be finished. And now the test would be, what of the spiritual value of it all?
Take away their meeting places and their public meetings and their public ministries and all that upon which they depended so much externally; remove it all! That was imminent. What remains? The Holy Spirit had these two things in mind in directing the writing of this marvelous letter. It was indeed a great crisis. Who is to say that that on the second point will not be repeated worldwide as it is taking place in quite a large part of the world today? The Lord may know of a day not far away when that will spread and all those things which are the externals of Christianity, upon which Christians depend, will be swept away and no longer available. We’ve had a little touch of it in our lifetime, many Christians have in this very country, and it could be very much more so and very quickly, that crisis may be looming upon the near horizon.
So this letter is indeed a letter of crisis in both ways. We ask what was the cause or what were the causes of this crisis? On the spiritual side, firstly, I think there's no doubt about it, it was the cost of the way that these Christians had embarked upon and had been called upon to follow. You read the letter again and you will see the suggestions or the indications that it was because the way was proving so hard. They had started... started upon the heavenly way, partners in a heavenly calling, they had taken a position with Christ. That position is hinted at at the end of the letter, “Let us go to Him without the camp”. To be outside of the religious camp, outside of the popular camp, outside of the traditional camp, is a hard place and a hard way. They had taken a position with the Lord but were finding that it was a very testing way indeed. They were being tested onevery point in every possible way. It was a hard way. A hard way. Reference is made to what they suffered as they took that position.
Now, this suffering came largely from without. We don’t know where these believers were, whether they were in Jerusalem or in Rome; there’s argument for both, but we can very well imagine that if it were in Jerusalem they were right up against a very, very severe testing of their position spiritually. They were in the place where the Lord Himself was crucified, the place where Stephen had been martyred, where the believers had been scattered. If they were in Rome, it was only quite recently that Claudius had issued his edict against the Christians and they had been expelled and scattered and martyred.
Whatever it was, it came from the outside in the beginning and it was a hard and costly way, but it is significant to note that before we’re at the end of this letter, the writer (the Holy Spirit through the writer) speaks of all this suffering as the child training of a father. “My son despise not thou the chastening, the child training of the Lord, for whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth...” and so on. Their sufferings may have come from devil-driven men, from the very devil himself, and yet they’re in the hands of a Father, Father has hold of those sufferings for the training of His children. That’s impressive! But it doesn’t altogether ease the situation to know that... the sufferings are still the sufferings wherever they come from and whatever their nature is and even if the Lord has hold of them they’re still sufferings. And because of this costliness of the way, these believers were losing heart, becoming discouraged, and the crisis of their going on arose. Hence this tenfold repetition: “let us, let us, let us go on”.
