A Kingdom That Cannot Be Shaken

by T. Austin-Sparks

Chapter 1 - The Eternal Pattern of the Kingdom

"For not unto angels did He subject the world to come, whereof we speak" (Heb. 2:5).

"But we behold Him who has been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honour" (Heb. 2:9).

"...And tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the age to come" (Heb. 6:5).

"Wherefore, receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken..." (Heb. 12:28).

Just by way of a preliminary word, let me say that it is not our thought to embark upon an exposition of the letter to the Hebrews. Our object is not to note what any particular part of the Scripture teaches or contains, but rather to know what God has revealed for the time in which we are living. That will be found in all the Scriptures, but this letter does contain a peculiarly comprehensive presentation of that revelation of God. As you well know, it covers the Scriptures almost entirely, from before creation, to and through creation, and on through the Old Testament it moves and takes up the gospels, embraces the writings of the apostle Paul, and moves to the great consummation of the kingdom which is coming. It is, therefore, very comprehensive, and we can say that it brings to us, in a concise way, God's mind from eternity as centred in the people whom He is gathering out of the nations in our own dispensation.

These three fragments which we have read, and making them even more fragmentary than in the text, do gather up into themselves not only all that this letter is about in itself, but all that God's revelation is about.

"Not unto angels did He subject the inhabited earth to come".

"But we behold Him...".

"The powers of the coming age".

"Wherefore, receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken".

I want to say just here for the moment - it will occupy us more fully perhaps later - that "receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken" is a present, active thing. It is not that we are going to receive a kingdom; we are now in the process of receiving the kingdom which cannot be shaken. That is actually the sense and meaning of the word.

The inhabited earth to come - the powers of a coming age - receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken - that is the thing in view, that is what it is all about. You have to move into all the details of this letter with that always as the object. Why this and this and this? Because of that. It is all pointing to that, it all has to do with that. What is the meaning of all this other? Well, that is the meaning of it. It has to do with an age to come, a kingdom which cannot be shaken, the inhabited earth to come. So you go back to the beginning of the letter, and you can understand that great first part - the introduction of the Son.

The Prospect

But look at these three fragments again just to get their connection.

Firstly, a coming kingdom.

Then, the earnest of that coming kingdom - "have tasted of the powers of the age to come".

Then, a present receiving of that kingdom. It is coming in now, and we are supposed to be coming into it now with all that it means as to its nature.

Christ God's Eternal Pattern

So the first section of the letter presents us with the eternal pattern of that kingdom, of that age to come. The eternal pattern is declared right at the outset, and we find the pattern to be a person. It is very important for us to get a right approach and right standpoint in this matter of Christ as the Pattern-Person of the kingdom, of the age to come: as the "Person-Pattern" of the coming age. Christ did not come because other people failed; a lot of people are mentioned here, Adam failed; Moses failed; Aaron failed; Joshua failed; Israel failed, and so Christ came - not at all! It is the wrong standpoint, the wrong approach. If they had never failed, He would have come. He was eternally appointed and destined to be this pattern of God's kingdom, of what things would be when God had them according to His mind. He is not just an emergency provision, a difference, of course, obtains.

If Adam had not failed, then some might say Christ would have been unnecessary; not at all. If Adam had not failed, if he had triumphed right through in all Divine intention, Christ would have been necessary to be the crown of that work. Adam's failure simply brought God's original thought in, and in Christ God says, "Yes, man may fail, but My first thought does not fail, My Man does not fail". The point is that whether man failed or did not fail, Christ was there already as God's pattern for things, and everything was determined and destined to take its character from the Son. Man, even without failure, would have simply come to the pattern of Christ, and Christ would have been the head, the crown, the measure, the stature, the fullness, even for unfallen man. Do not let us be mistaken about this, that Adam failed, therefore Christ; all these others failed, men and things; therefore Christ. No! God is building upon a Rock which could not fail from eternity.

God's foundation stands outside of time, God's pattern stands altogether apart from the exigencies of creation. It is the eternity of God's thought and intention which is our absolute assurance. If for one moment we allow what has come into time, that which we know of man, of ourselves, to be a governing thing, we are on sand. If our feet are upon something that goes far back beyond what happened in time, we are on rock, and I would like very much to stay and just leave the whole thing and talk about [this] Rock, for I am quite sure that what the Lord's people need to do perhaps more than anything else is to understand their Rock. There is an awful shaking going on, and the individual Christian is knowing that shaking. We get a terrible knocking about and buffeting over our faith, yes, even over our standing. This terrible Accuser never, never ceases to try and bring us back into questions, uncertainties and weakness as to our position with God and as to God's attitude toward us. Perhaps you know something of that; it is true. We need to know our Rock, the nature, the comprehensiveness of our Rock, Christ Jesus.

It is not only the Person, as we are going to see. We have used this phrase - the Pattern is a Person and the Person is the Pattern - that is a whole range of things gathered into Christ, as this letter unfolds a whole range of things, the whole question of righteousness, everything is gathered into Him. He becomes our Rock in the sense that everything that we need for an eternal realisation of God's purpose is in such a one as He is, and He has not just come in because things have gone wrong; He was there before ever anything went wrong at all, and God is not just repairing. God has His perfect and complete and final work in His Son.

There is no question, there is no doubt, there is no room for any question at all as to whether God is going to succeed, because He has, He has got it. Here this little fragment about tasting of the powers of the age to come, is that when the Holy Spirit is with us, we have the earnest of that coming age, it will all be like that. So let us get our approach right.

Christ No Mere Emergency Measure

I wonder if you have grasped what I have been trying to say? I think most people do make that wrong approach and have that wrong standpoint: everything has gone wrong, Adam has gone wrong and all these things and all these men have failed, and things are failing now, and therefore God must bring in some emergency measure to put that right. Not at all; Christ is no mere emergency measure. Christ is there before the emergency arose, He is God's pattern from eternity.

Christ's coming in deals with the conditions which have come about, it is quite true, but that is only God's way of securing what He originally established as His Intention. That is just the line that comes down and goes up again to pick things up; God's thought goes on without a bend downward at all, God's mind is established from eternity to eternity. Christ transcended men and Christ transcended all the things. Adam - did everything become involved in Adam? Was Adam final? No, Adam himself was only a pattern of Him that was to come (Rom. 5:14). He was to come, Adam was only a pattern of Him that was to come.

You are all prepared to say that the tabernacle in the wilderness is not it, it is only a pattern of heavenly things. So was Adam - he was not it any more than the tabernacle was it, Christ is the reality before and over Adam. Adam fails, Christ never fails. "Jesus Christ the same yesterday and today, and forever" (Heb. 13:8). That is the message here. Yes, the things failed, but, fail or not fail, they are only a pattern. Christ is essential, He transcends them. They have failed; it does not make any difference, this letter says. You do not throw up your hands in despair because Adam failed, because Moses failed, Aaron failed, Israel failed, the tabernacle failed - all failure. No, they are only patterns, and whether they fail or they do not fail, Christ is there over and above all. But, as I said earlier, He would have come in any case. He has come to redeem, but had redemption not been necessary, He would have come to crown, to be the crown of all. Well, the men and the things were only signs, after all.

Christ an Eternal Necessity

There is a very deep question - it may seem like a theological question - involved in what I have said. It is not just some abstruse thing. If Adam had not failed, where would he have arrived? Would he have arrived at deity? Would there have been a deifying of humanity? Never! It raises the whole question of the person of Christ as very God, and God is to be all and in all ultimately. He is to be the crown of His creation. Man, even unfailing man, can never of himself come to God's thoughts. Oh, how much is involved in this, especially in these days when there is such tremendous stress being laid upon the inherent qualities and potentialities of humanity.

There has been correspondence in one of our newspapers recently on this very matter, where an outstanding ecclesiastical dignity has said once and for all, talking about man's depravity, that it is all nonsense; he has never found the man whom he could consign to hell, and he has never yet found the man whom he could not send to heaven. What is that but making man capable of rising to sublime heights of acceptance with God by reason of his own inherent qualities? But even unfallen man would never have arrived at that, only by the crowning of him with Christ, that is, putting it round another way and saying by his coming to the fullness of Christ.

Christ was essential, for man apart from Christ, can never come to God's thought. Christ is God's thought and is essential in any case. He has come to redeem, but, redemption or no redemption, He is essential. Do you see how much is touched by that? Oh, it touches the whole matter of how far we can go, what hope there is in ourselves. Why are we struggling, why are we so fretted about ourselves? To find some goodness in ourselves, to produce something which will commend us to God - for that is really the trouble with most of us. We are all the time trying to find some ground of justification in ourselves. When we make a mistake, when we go wrong, when we slip up, when we fail, we have a bad time because we feel that we are so bad, so hopeless. We take such a long time to come to God's final conclusion about that, that it is true, it is perfectly true, we are hopeless. A great deal of our bad time would be dismissed if only we saw this - that if we were all that we ourselves wanted to be, we should still need Christ. If all that in us which we hate were taken away, we would still need Christ.

Christ is essential at every stage of life; from the lowest depths of sin and iniquity to the highest level of sanctity and piety, Christ is still needed. That is why those who have lived long lives in fellowship with God and have attained unto a large measure of godliness and piety and holiness and who do know what it is to walk with the Lord, still have as their deepest consciousness the absolute necessity of their Lord. We never get past that, the Holy Spirit will see to that. Any self-satisfaction as to our spiritual state is contrary to the witness of the Spirit. Christ is essential.

So let us not despair over the failure. We are not, of course, going at once to accept a life of sin and evil indulgences on that ground, you will not think that that is what I mean, but you will understand this, that what this letter teaches (and I am speaking only in a general way at present about it) what the Scriptures teach throughout is this: that all these men and all these things have failed, but that is no reason whatever for despair. The Son is from eternity. He goes back before all the failure and He holds good over it all, He transcends it all. He is the pattern - not this one and that one. Never make anything or any man the pattern. There is only one Pattern, that is Christ.

If we begin to measure ourselves by ourselves or one another, we begin to set up models, patterns, and ideals here, we are doomed to have a most terrible disillusionment and our faith to be destroyed if it is fastened upon anything less and other than Christ. That is the teaching, and that is why the first chapter of Hebrews brings the Son right into full view. "God, having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners...". When all these times are past and all these fragmentary ways of speaking are concluded, He gathers it all up and presents it in His Son "whom He appointed". When did He appoint Him heir of all things? Before the worlds were - "through whom He made the ages". Antecedent to the creation of the ages, He appointed Him heir of all things. That is the declaration; and then this marvelous presentation of Him as transcending all others, even angels. So the pattern is first the Son, as such, even before redemption is brought into view. You come on to the redemption afterward, the redemption follows, but the pattern for the redemption is there already. The redemption is only back to the pattern.

The Eternal All-Inclusiveness of Christ

(a) Family Relationship with God

Well, this Divine intimation, as we have said, is very comprehensive, and the very first thing about it is that Christ is eternally inclusive: to use the phrase of Paul - "all things in Christ" (Eph. 1:10), the inclusiveness of this Pattern-Person. The first thing included in Him is the relationship with God which is to obtain in the age to come which is to be the universal position in that kingdom. What is it? Well, look at all these things about "holy brethren" (Heb. 3:1), "I and the children whom God hath given Me" (Heb. 2:13), "I will declare Thy name unto My brethren" (Heb. 2:12). It is a family relationship, a relationship of sons in the Son. That is how it is going to be, and that is the kingdom that we are receiving.

The very first step and fragment of the kingdom which we are receiving now is the Spirit of sonship, is a relationship, a family relationship, with God in Christ. You can see how that comprehends the Cross, and how especially it takes up the gospels. "Our Father" (Matt. 6:9); "My Father and your Father" (John 20:17); "My God and your God" (John 20:17). If we stop to gather up all that, you see how much there is. But here it is - the kingdom which we are now receiving, the kingdom which is within us, is, in its very first phase, this: a family relationship, born ones, born from above, born by the Spirit of God, born of God. But that is in Christ, and if that were true of all men willy-nilly, then Christ need never have come, and certainly He need never have done the work of redemption. But here no argument is necessary for the new birth being essential. We know that relationship in a family.

It is a great prospect that in that age to come, the coming age, the inhabited earth to come whereof we are speaking, that kingdom which we are now receiving, but which will one day be full, complete, in it universally the nature of things at the very beginning and foundation will be a family relationship and all that that means - not what we sometimes mean when we talk about families. We talk about 'the human family'. What a mess it is! It is something more than just relationship, it is a nature, a kind of relationship. It is according to the relationship which existed and exists between the Father and the Son.

We do not want to be too technical and theological, but it is necessary for us to have understanding, and do not let us think of these words just as terms which indicate a kind of ordered systematized connection - father and son. I believe that these very words mean more a nature, a kind, than just a relationship. You can have fathers and you can have sons, but how tragic that fact can be. You cannot get away from the fact that that man is the father and the son is a son, but what a tragic thing it is that it is so, in so many cases. But here see the kind of father and the kind of son, and what exists between them, what it means that they are so related. That is to be expanded to the whole inhabited earth to come whereof we are speaking. That is the nature of the age to come, that is the kingdom which we are receiving, but oh! What a challenge that is to us. Are we receiving that kingdom, are we receiving that nature, is that kind of relationship being established between us in Christ? That is the work of the Spirit, but that is another aspect of things to which we come as we go on.

(b) Dominion

Another one of the things in the inclusiveness of the Son is dominion. You pass from the type to the antitype. Adam is the type. "Thou madest him to have dominion" (Psa. 8:6). That is the type. Adam was a figure of Him that was to come. The antitype, the last Adam - "We behold Him... crowned with glory and honour" (Heb. 2:9). He is in the place of absolute dominion. We will have to look at that more fully later.

Dominion is not just an official position. It is ascendancy by reason of spiritual quality. There was that about the Lord Jesus in the days of His humiliation which was an absolutely dominant thing spiritually and morally in the presence of those who had this world's dominion in their hands. They were cowed by Him, He was the One who had the ascendancy. They did everything they could to wriggle out of that moral mastery which was with Him. Oh, if only they had not been brought into that predicament! What can they do to get out of the way of this Man? He is too much for them, and there He is - His visage marred more than any man, in humiliation and suffering, and yet He is spiritually and morally the Prince; and dominion is that.

What is all this chastening about? God is dealing with us as with sons, and He "learned obedience by the things which He suffered" (Heb. 4:8). He was made perfect through suffering, though He was a Son. "God dealt with you as with sons" (Heb. 7:7). What is it all about? Have you pictures of sitting on golden thrones and all that sort of thing? That is not it. We are receiving a kingdom now, and it is not very pleasant. Every day we are challenged as to spiritual ascendancy, as to moral ascendancy, as to whether we are knowing how to reign together, and that is not official. The very position of humiliation - yes, the off-scouring of all things in which we are found is the position which is qualifying, is the position in which we are intended by the Lord to be qualified for the age to come. That is what is going on. It is not a pleasant gospel, a pleasant teaching. We are slow to grasp it. That is what is going on. We are receiving the kingdom, but what is the kingdom? Well, it is sonship, but it is dominion.

But what is the nature of the dominion? Do you think that God is building His kingdom upon the lines on which men build theirs? We have seen kingdoms built in the last twelve years. What kind of kingdoms have they been? Ascendancy, mastery, domination, dominion, yes, all the language you like - the idea of man being in the position of being overlord. Is God going to build a thing like that? All that sort of thing is destined to go, and who will be the king unto our God? Those of us on this earth who, like our Lord have gone into humiliation, suffering and emptiness and weakness, and have learned in those conditions how to rise above them in our spirit. "The Father of our spirits" (Heb. 12:9). That is the realm in which everything is going on.

(c) Access

Then all these other matters of access suggested by Moses and Aaron; the matter of heirship or inheritance, which is coming into our rest, suggested by Joshua; all these things are now found to be in their fullest and transcendent meaning in Christ. Joshua failed to bring finally into the inheritance and into the rest, but not so with Christ. Moses and Aaron failed finally to establish the people in the presence of God in their access to Him; not so with Christ. "Through Him we... have access to the Father" (Eph. 2:18). "Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace" (Heb. 4:18). It is all in the inclusiveness of Christ, and this is the meaning of the coming kingdom.

I think I will stop there for the time being. The kingdom is on its way. It is not just something which is in itself exclusive, objective, out there, and one day it will come and be here. It is on its way.

Dear brother, dear sister, in trial, every time you gain a spiritual victory, the kingdom has come; you are receiving the kingdom every time you know some fresh expression of Christ as victor in your heart; the kingdom has come. Every time you know what it is to have blessed fellowship and communion with your God and Father in the inner sanctuary where you have entered and had your access, you are receiving a kingdom, the kingdom has come.

The kingdom is on its way now, but, in other words, we are now, as the word literally means, in process of receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, and, having the Spirit, we have the earnest of the age to come. Whenever the Holy Spirit manifests Himself in power, we have tasted of the powers of the age to come. It is only an earnest, it is only a taste; it is going to be all like that. Well then, why cling to mere types and figures and outward things when that is the nature of things? That is what the letter is all about. That has all failed. Why cling to it, why try to revive it, why try to re-establish that, why go on with it? It has never done the thing which men hoped it would, or had wanted it to do, tried to make it do; but Christ is the realisation of every thought suggested by those things, and you can leave that and "look off unto Jesus the author and perfecter..." (Heb. 12:2), the beginning, the end, the all-comprehending of the Divine thought. "Look off unto Jesus".