The Gospel of John

by T. Austin-Sparks

Chapter 3 - God's Purpose Realised Through Sonship

Reading: John 17; Num. 3:5-7,9,11-13,41,45; 8:13,15; Acts 20:28; Eph. 5:25-26; Heb. 12:23; 2:10-12,17; 3:1.

It is not very difficult to recognise the spiritual link between John 17 and those passages which we have linked with them, both in the Old Testament and the New Testament. They are a commentary upon the chapter, an exposition of it. We shall, as we come to this point in our meditation, allow those Scriptures to interpret John 17 to us.

We are keeping before us the ultimate object of God. We can only understand any part of His Word and get the full value from it, as we see it in the light of God's eternal intention, and so once more we remind ourselves that God sets forth His full thought in a representative way, and demands that that thought presented shall be a governing one for all generations. The full intention or thought of God is the manifestation of Himself, and to give Himself an expression throughout the universe, and He has chosen to do that through a vessel which shall be the instrument of the manifestation of God, and therefore that vessel must take its character from Him. It is not just a reflection of God, but a living expression of Him. That is what God has planned as the end of all things.

Levitical Ministry

Now, the Levites represent that thought. We must remember that the Old Testament is a book of spiritual principles and we are not to take it in a literal way, because these opportunities are wrapped up in figures and types, representations and symbols. The types and the figures in themselves always fall short of that which they are called to typify, and what we have to look for is that which they are intended to embody and set forth as a spiritual truth. The Levites, therefore, embody a great spiritual principle, and we must not take the Levites as representing something literal for all time (we will touch upon that further later).

We begin by recognising this, that the Levites do embody and set forth in a typical way the full thought of God; that is, the manifestation of Himself, God expressing Himself, God bringing a world into the knowledge of Himself, God distributing the knowledge of Himself abroad through a channel. To put that round the other way, it is an instrument, a vessel standing to show God's thoughts to men, to the universe, because it is not only unto man, but in so far as the truth of the church is hidden in the Levites, the manifestation of God by them is also unto principalities and powers. It is a universal making known of God, expressing God.

Recognising that as the inclusive and comprehensive fact, we can break it up into smaller fragments, and note certain things about the Levites.

Firstly, the Levite was to be always kept and held in honour, regard, and care. You notice that even in days of deep and terrible declension, when things had gone far from God's thought, the Levite was still held in honour and respect. He had a place - sometimes superstitiously so - but he was recognised.

Then note the Levites' relationship to the rest of the people. The Levites were taken as a tribe in place of all the firstborn. The Lord said, in the day that He smote the firstborn in the land of Egypt, that He took all the firstborn of Israel to be His. In the firstborn all the family is regarded as being included and summed up. The firstborn stands as over the family in an inclusive and representative way, so that, in taking the firstborn, the Lord said, "The family is Mine, all the others belong to Me", just as the firstfruits were claimed by God as an earnest of all the harvest and all the fruit as God's right, to be held for God. So that when the Levites were taken in the place of the firstborn, from God's standpoint it was the taking of all the people as His. So they represented all Israel in relation to God, as being a priestly nation.

That is what we meant when we said that we must not take them in a literal way, but in a spiritual way, as embodying a principle. The Levites spiritually do not represent a class apart. Nowadays ministers and laity are spoken of, but that is a thought foreign to the Word of God, and it is just a failure to recognise this fact which has led to such a division and false position: the Levites are not the ministers among the Lord's people, but they are the Lord's people in ministry. All the Lord's people are regarded as ministering in priestly office unto the Lord.

Then note the corresponding truth, the counterpart of that, the relationship of the Levite to God. They were to be offered as a wave offering unto the Lord. They were His. They belonged to Him in an utter way: "They are Mine, saith the Lord." But they are His as purchased with blood, redeemed unto God. That lies at the very foundation of Israel's history in the blood of the Pascal Lamb. It is followed on in another symbolic way, by the half shekel of silver; the redemption of the firstborn by the half shekel of silver. Silver, as we know, is the type of redemption. Therefore the Levites set forth the fact that the people of God are His by reason of redemption, purchased with precious blood.

The next thing that follows is that the Levites were given to Aaron to minister unto him. They were a gift to Aaron, the High Priest. It is almost impossible for us to close our ears to the demand for entrance at this moment of words from John 17: "...those whom Thou hast given Me... they are Thine, and Thou gavest them to Me..." - but we must not anticipate things too soon. The Levites were given to Aaron to be his fellows in responsibility for the testimony of the Lord, for the preservation, maintenance, and perpetuation of the Lord's testimony. They were fellows with Aaron.

Now, those few things help us when we come to John 17, for undoubtedly we are in the presence of the High Priest, who is, according to His own words in this prayer, consecrating Himself, or has consecrated Himself. Everything in this chapter, so far as the Lord Jesus Himself is concerned, is High Priestly. He has, right through this Gospel, been represented as taking the place of Jewish ordinances one after the other. He has taken the place of the Passover, and has Himself become the Pascal Lamb, the shed blood. He has taken the place of the Feast of Tabernacles. He has stepped right into the place of all the feasts of the Jews and transferred them to Himself. Now at length He steps right into the place of the High Priest and transfers that to Himself also. But He is not alone. There is a priestly company for whom He is concerned, and He links their consecration with His own: "For their sakes I consecrate Myself, that they may be consecrated." There is a priestly company consecrated in the consecration of the High Priest, the Lord Jesus.

Now notice the family element in this chapter (and this is the heart of things). Notice the repeated occurrences of the name, "Father": "O righteous Father"; "Holy Father"; "Father, the hour is come". Then notice, linked with that, "the Son"; "glorify the Son that the Son may glorify Thee". Then, as in that relationship: "Thine they were, and Thou gavest them to Me"; "those whom Thou hast given Me".

Sonship

When you want the explanation of that, you turn to the passages of the letter to the Hebrews: "He was not ashamed to call them brethren... saying, I and the children whom God hath given Me... I will declare Thy name unto My brethren... Wherefore, holy brethren, partners in the heavenly calling, consider the apostle and High Priest". It is a High Priestly Family, and that brings us to the heart of things. The heart of things is sonship. By what means, on what basis, has God determined from all eternity to reveal, to manifest, and express Himself throughout this universe? It is through sonship, and what sonship means in its full thought. "Son-wise" is God's eternal thought for the revelation of Himself.

The Lord Jesus in this chapter - while the actual words are not used - is clearly set forth as the Son from all eternity, the Firstborn. He speaks twice of His relationship with the Father before the world was, and as we have already pointed out, He was chosen before the foundation of the world as the Son in whom God would sum up all things. Then in Him we were chosen and foreordained unto the adoption as sons.

Now we understand two things: the Levites being in principle the firstborn; and the word in Hebrews 12:22-23: "...ye are come... unto the church of the firstborn ones, whose names are enrolled in heaven". So sonship governs everything, and Hebrews has again told us that by reason of our relationship with Him, "because the children are sharers in flesh and blood, He also partook of the same... He that sanctified (or consecrated) and they that are sanctified (consecrated) are all of one and these are the many sons whom He is bringing to glory.

That will lay the foundation of everything for us. First of all it will explain to us the real nature of our union with Christ, begotten of God, risen with Christ, joined to Him in risen life.

If you care to meditate long enough upon John 17 with this thought in mind you will find it unspeakably profitable. All the rest of John's gospel is gathered into John 17. The Lord Jesus is set forth as having enunciated in word and deed great principles in relation to God's eternal, ultimate end, the revelation of Himself in the universe through a company in Christ; and, having set forth those laws, those principles in word and in deed, He gathers them all up in prayer, and then, as it were, prays the whole thing through.

It is a lesson for us. Principles are not just abstract things, they are things which have got to be prayed about. They have to be prayed into action, into realisation, into fulfilment. It seems, moving in the realm of the Holy Spirit, as though the Lord Jesus took up all those things and prayed them through with the Father. He goes right back to eternity past, and takes things up as in the counsels of God, and then He comes on and touched upon all these things relative to that predestined purpose and end of God, the revelation of His glory. He touches in this prayer upon God being glorified in Him, and He being glorified in God, and the church coming into that glory. He touches upon the fact that the purpose of God can only be realised in a corporate Body, sharing one Life in a unity of one Spirit, and He prays it out.

This is not a matter for detached and unrelated individuals; it is a corporate thing, and He prays it through. So He touches upon all these things from the beginning.

We saw that the very first principle governing the end of God is the possessing of eternal Life, and new creation Life, and He touches upon it twice: "...that He should give eternal life to as many as Thou hast given Him. And this is life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Him whom Thou didst send, Jesus Christ." The principles are all taken up, all the elements of this great purpose of God, and prayed over and prayed through, gathered up in prayer. That is where you and I have got to end; not in the accumulating of principles, not in the constituting of a kind of manual of spiritual laws, but in getting down in prayer to have these things prayed into expression, into realisation.

He gathers up sixteen chapters, so far as their governing principles are concerned, and prays them through. It is a most impressive thing. He is praying through, all-inclusively and comprehensively, the question of sonship. It is not enough that in the eternal counsels of God the sons were foreseen, foreordained and chosen in Him. That is a great truth, but even that has got to be prayed over. This is one of the mysteries. We cannot reconcile these things mentally. They will always remain to us a mystery, but there is the fact, that while God knows everything at the beginning, sees the end and possesses the end at the beginning, from eternity, the realisation of that end comes about through prayer, through co-operation with Him. This He has pointed out.

The whole matter of sonship, gathered up in all its elements and features, is being prayed through. You can see what the church is as the church of the firstborn ones. It is heavenly in its origin, heavenly in its life, heavenly in its fellowship, heavenly in its unity, heavenly in its vocation. These are all things which are marked in type, in symbol in the Levites. Its heavenliness comes out of the fact, is the outgrowth of the fact, that it has received a heavenly life, and that heavenliness is developed by its living according to that heavenly life that is all the time drawing upon the exalted Lord, the heavenly Lord for its life, for all its resources. So it develops in its heavenly nature and heavenly vocation. Its very oneness, its very unity is the expression of that one Life which it possesses by the Holy Spirit.

I do not believe that we are to pray John 17 now. Very often we hear people praying in the terms of John 17, "that they all may be one". That prayer has been answered. At Pentecost that prayer was answered. He prayed it through, and it was answered at Pentecost. The church is one. We have to do nothing to make the unity of the body of Christ. All we have to do is to guard it, to watch over it, to cherish it and give diligence to keep it. Every believer out of every nation, tribe, kindred and tongue shares one Life by one Spirit, and has their oneness in that basic fact. We discover that spontaneously. You know a living child of God when you meet one, without any introduction. If you meet one who has really got the Life in them, it is not long before you discover them. That Life is one Life; it flows together.

The enemy has scored a great success by getting the Lord's people down on to that level where they accept a broken unity, and think that they have got to work for the recovery of unity, instead of taking the positive attitude that, whatever is done here on this earth, that in heaven, in Christ the Body is one, and nothing can alter that. So far as the testimony to it is concerned, that is another thing. That is where we have to give diligence.

That is our Levitical ministry, to testify, to maintain the testimony to the heavenly facts. The Levites were a representation of heavenly things. The letter to the Hebrews tells us that this tabernacle, and all that had to do with it, were a pattern of the things in the heavens. The Levites were a pattern of things in the heavenlies. The Lord desires to have a testimony here to heavenly realities.

We dare not take the opposite view, that because the Body is one in heaven, indestructibly and indivisibly, it does not matter how we behave towards one another here. It does matter. Our heavenly ministry and vocation is related to an expression here of heavenly things, the thoughts of God, and this is Levitical ministry in which we have to give diligence.

If we were going on at this point to see what the ministry of the Levites was, we should see that it has to do with the tabernacle (the tent) of Testimony, and that is Christ and His members; a corporate thing. They had the care of that. But what we want is to keep the emphasis here, and here we finish for the time being.

It is sonship which is God's way, means, and method of manifesting Himself, and sonship is, in the first place with God an established thing, but with us it is a progressive thing. Of course, all Divine truths are like that. With God they are complete and perfect and settled. Even the church is finished with Him, the last member is added with Him; so in Ephesians it is always represented as a complete thing, but from our side the matter is progressive. The initiation of sonship is when He sends forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, whereby we cry, "Abba, Father". That is the cry of the infant, it is the cry of the Spirit of Sonship, at its inception. But that sonship has to be progressive, and it is that which is the object of Divine attention and care. "God dealeth with you as with sons" and in all His activities with us, the one thing upon which He is concentrating all the time is the development of what is meant by sonship, full growth, and spiritual maturity; the end of which shall be the fullest possible manifestation of Himself. That is an individual as well as a corporate thing, and while we should get all the help that should come to us from recognising the individual and the personal side of that and the meaning of the dealings of God with us: all the explanation of the way in which He handles us, the experiences through which He takes us, the mysteries of our life, the hard things, is unto sonship.

But do let us remember that sonship in its fullest expression can never be by an individual or any number of individuals as such. It requires the corporate Body, and so there is a peculiar and particular kind of dealing on the part of God through corporate life which can never be known in separate individual life; that is the House of God; the fellowship of God's people provides God with a peculiar opportunity for developing sonship. For the flesh the most difficult place is the House of God.

The House of God

Jacob came to Bethel, but he was in the flesh, he was a carnal man, and it was impossible for him to stay there. The House of God is always an awful place to the flesh, and Jacob said: "How awful is this place." Jacob went on his way, and for twenty years he was under the hand of God in chastening, and then he came back to Bethel and he was able to abide. He is now made suitable to the House of God, and he can be there in rest.

The real spiritual fellowship of the saints is a very difficult place for us if we are in the flesh. We find the rub, the friction, the trial, the difficulty of relationships, of the different constitutions and temperaments and dispositions of the Lord's people. Ah, but it is the supreme opportunity for living in the Spirit, and not in the flesh; for living on a basis of the Spirit and not on the basis of the natural life. It is a great opportunity for ascendancy over all that is of the old creation. The fellowship of the Lord's people is a tremendous discipline and training. There is nothing more valuable to us and to God than real spiritual fellowship among the saints, but it is there that you find your training, there you find your discipline, there you find the constant demand for not living in the flesh or else you make trouble, but of moving in the Spirit all the time. There you must not allow your natural feelings to arise and influence you. You must allow the love of God all the time to triumph.

Through assembly life and fellowship God is securing something He could not secure if He put us all as isolated units in different parts of the world. It is this Life in which we constantly refuse to take on what people are naturally, and to live in the love of God, in the Spirit of Christ. I have never yet met the person with whom I could find no fault at all; not that we look for faults, but sooner or later we do come up against something that we do not approve of, that we think is strange, peculiar, or something that they would be better without. Now, that is the opportunity to get above that. It is in the corporate life of His people that the Lord has a special opportunity. I do not believe our training can possibly be complete until we have got to the place where in corporate life we know the triumph of the grace of God. Is not that the tragedy of so much of the Lord's work - Christians not able to get on with one another, missionaries at strife with their fellows, and the work of the Lord being arrested and the testimony being lost?

The House of God is a great training centre for service - we mean by that the fellowship of God's people - and no one ought to be put in a place of spiritual responsibility who has not graduated in fellowship, who has not learned to live triumphantly with difficult people if they are the Lord's people. It is so easy to resign if people are difficult, and go and work somewhere else where they are not so difficult. If we do so, we have thrown away our supreme opportunity of qualification for honour.

So the Lord prays this thing out, and He puts the testimony right in the balances with this: "That they all may be one: as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us: that the world may believe". There is your ministry; there is your testimony. God deals with us in our relationships in a way of discipline to develop sonship.

Perhaps after this we shall have to take a different attitude to people, and see that that very difficult person whom the Lord does not remove from our lives is His way of developing sonship, and when sonship has been developed, then perhaps the Lord can change the situation - or it may be that it is already changed, by the fact that we are changed.

Sonship is the way in which God is going to reveal Himself through this universe, and that will be as we - individually, as far as possible, and collectively, in a far bigger way - are conformed to the image of God's Son, and we have come eventually to the adoption as sons for which the whole universe waits, unto which the whole creation has been subjected to vanity. Then, when the sons are manifested, the creation shall be delivered.