"This is the Testimony"

by T. Austin-Sparks

Chapter 2 - Divine Light

"This is the message... that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all... if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another" (1 John 1:5,7).

"Again, a new commandment write I unto you, which thing is true in him and in you; because the darkness is passing away, and the true light already shines. He that says he is in the light and hates his brother, is in the darkness even until now. He that loves his brother abides in the light, and there is no occasion of stumbling in him" (1 John 2:8-10).

"But we all, with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit. Therefore seeing we have this ministry, even as we obtained mercy, we faint not; but we have renounced the hidden things of shame, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by the manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God. And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled in them that perish: in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should not dawn upon them" (2 Cor. 3:18-4:4).

"And I turned to see the voice that spoke with me. And having turned I saw seven golden candlesticks" (Rev. 1:12).

"And He carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed 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, as it were a jasper stone, clear as crystal" (Rev. 21:10-11).

What we are speaking about is the testimony of Jesus as the embodiment of Divine Light, Divine Life, and Divine Love - the testimony committed to the church and the churches and to all who belong to it: the testimony of Jesus for which we are to stand, with which we are entrusted. A great deposit.

God's Begetting

Now, let us begin with this thought, this question: what does God beget? Because, you see, this first letter of John is full of begetting. In the introduction to his gospel he uses the word, "The only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14). Here he is bringing in that One again, then he is speaking about our being begotten: "Whosoever is begotten of God doeth no sin" (1 John 3:9). Look at the word 'begotten' in this letter. What does God beget?

I am going to be perfectly reverent, though it may sound a strange way of approach, and say: God has no ancestors. When we beget, we beget our ancestors; we reproduce a whole history, all sorts of things come in. If only we knew where certain traits in ourselves came from, we might get back generations and find that thing. Sometimes we see in a child something we knew in a grandparent. Our begetting is gathering up a history, and a terribly mixed history. What a mixture we are, and where does it all come from? What is it that goes to make us up? Well, a whole lot, for a long way back, right back to Adam.

God has no ancestors; God is the beginning, and God is absolute, self-existent, self-contained. He draws upon nothing and no one, and He is perfect in everything. His nature is perfect, and there is in God no strain of any other element than Himself. And when God begets, He begets after His own likeness, so that, when we have the only begotten of the Father, when we have the Lord Jesus, we have the very essence of the Divine nature in perfection, without any other strain, without any other history. He is the beginning and the end, complete, self-contained, self-sufficient.

God's Thought For Man

Why have we said that? In order to get back to the Divine idea about man, because this is not only the Son of God; this is the Son of Man. As Son of Man - "the holy thing which is begotten..." (Luke 1:35) - even through Mary, that holy thing. God has begotten - even there it is from God and as Son of Man He does fully and completely answer to God's thought because He answers to God's nature. And that was God's thought in creation, that man at some point, on triumphing through probation, should become a partaker of the Divine nature - not to become God, not to become deified, but to become a partaker of Divine nature. And it was over that point, that Divine thought and conception, that the battle raged. And it was on three major and inclusive points: Light, Life, and Love. You can see the whole history of this world gathered up into those three words.

The Blinding Work of the Enemy and Its Undoing

We are only taking the first for the moment - Light. Go back to the Garden. What is the meaning of this Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and their eyes being enlightened? It is false light, it is light in disobedience, it is light which is darkness, it is light which issues in blindness. "The god of this world hath blinded the minds of the unbelieving", and that goes right back to Adam. He had capacity for seeing, he had the faculty for seeing something he had not yet seen, but satan came in to strike blindness into that very faculty for seeing, and from that time the race in Adam has been a blinded race (I am coming back to him presently) and all born of Adam are blind. They are born blind - you cannot be worse than that. The very faculty for seeing the first thing of Divine thoughts has to be created now, to come in a new creation, "The natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God... he cannot know them..." (1 Cor. 2:14).

Well, it is not necessary for me to take you to John to give you the instances in which the very Divine nature of the Son of God is being established in the opening of blind eyes, in the opening of the eyes of one who was blind from birth. It is God's way of demonstrating this great truth.

When the Lord Jesus comes, He not only takes the place of the first Adam before his blindness, but He is in the place where that first Adam might have been if he had not sinned and been struck blind, and come under the power of the god of this age. He comes as the One Who knows, Who is in the Light, Who is the Light, Who has the Divine thoughts with Him in fulness.

Then, keeping the impassable gap and gulf between Deity and glorified humanity (it is glorified humanity I am after, that is the object) keeping within that space, He immediately begins to make it known that it is the Divine purpose that believers should come into the Light as He is in the Light, and should have the Light as He has the Light - should be as He is as Son of man begotten of God. And that which is begotten of God sins not, and that is in you and in me. We are not that, but there is that in us by Divine begetting which does not sin. And because it is there, we have a bad time when we sin because it witnesses against our sin. It is there; it is that which is begotten of God, which is from the beginning, which is eternal: a full thought of God. You can see what God's end is, it is what it was at the beginning before the failure of the first Adam; it is secured in the last Adam.

The Spirit of Prophecy

Now John says: "The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy" (Rev. 19:10). If you do not grasp what that means, it is this. Simply, that there has been the Holy Spirit working right from the very beginning, pointing on, prophesying. The Spirit has always been pointing on, indicating something ahead, always having something in view and indicating it, indicating it in a thousand different ways; sometimes by examples in men, sometimes by object lessons in things, sometimes by utterances through men. And what ground it covers, all these almost countless indications of something, finger points, shadows demanding substance. That is the Spirit of prophecy, and it says that it is the testimony of Jesus. That is, all that has from the beginning, indicated, suggested, pointed to, brought into view as looking on, as pointing to something, has all pointed to Jesus. The Spirit of prophecy is always pointing to Jesus. Prophecy is the testimony of Jesus.

What does that mean? That from the beginning of God's work there has always been, by every means, a pointing to Jesus. Why? What for? Because God's thought is a perfect one. When God made man, He made him innocent, but he was capable of something more, of enlargement, just as you can have a perfect babe and out of the same babe can come a perfect man. From the beginning, when God made man in innocence, He made him as a prophecy of something more. And everything was a prophecy of that something more, and that something more has now come to be found centred in and gathered up in Jesus; so that prophecy is a function and it is a function in the very constitution of things. In the very constitution of man, even before he fell, prophecy was a function. Adam "is a figure of Him that was to come" (Rom. 5:14). Therefore he was a prophet, not officially, not called a prophet - the office is altogether another thing. You may hold the office of a prophet and not be a prophet according to God. Many have done that - false prophets, but they were called prophets. The office may be right or wrong, but the function lies behind the office. A lot of people hold office in the 'church', but they are not that in the sight of God; not because they have not got the title, but because in the sight of God they are not functioning as God means such persons to do. Adam was a prophet in the very constitution of his being, pointing on to something more.

The Prophetic Function

What is the prophetic function? It is Light, always Light; it is always to bring in the Light of God's full thought. You see, the prophet functioned before the fall in Adam's very being, therefore he was pointing on. Adam was an indication, a prophecy, a foreshadowing, he was a representation of Divine thought. "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Gen. 1:26). He therefore embodied Divine thoughts, which thoughts had a far bigger fulfilment in view. But there he was, and he was intended to reveal God's thoughts in the creation, to bring the thoughts of God about man and creation always in view and keep them in view; so that the prophetic finger was pointing on, before sin came in. But when the prophets later came in, they were pointing back, not on; that is because things have gone wrong. Prophetic function, which is not necessarily official at all, is a life, a meaning, the work of keeping God's thoughts fully in view, bringing them back to God's people, and bringing God's people back to them. Therefore you find at the end of the Bible quite a bit about prophecy. It is just to bring God's full thought back.

Christ as Prophet

Now, all that is in Christ. You see all God's thought in Christ; He is a prophet in His own being, fully and utterly. He embodies and brings before the people of God the full thought of God. They can see what God's mind is. Follow that comprehensive first chapter of Revelation. It is the embodiment in types and symbols in that Person of God's Divine thoughts, "One like unto the Son of man" (v. 13); and then the description of Him, and every detail is a Divine thought, even to the whiteness of His hair. But the point is this, He comes as in that prophetic capacity and stands before the Lord's people, and says, "Here in Me you have all the Lord's thoughts about you and for you. Here in Me you have two things - God's thoughts in fulness brought down to you, and here in Me you have all God's thoughts in you brought up to God" - representation both ways, God satisfied as to His thoughts in man, man satisfied as to God's thoughts in Christ. It is a blessed thing to grasp Christ. His thoughts are so high, so great, so wonderful, they are past us. Who can attain unto them? How can we ever satisfy those perfect thoughts of God? Here is our satisfaction: there is One Who has provided God with all that He has ever wanted from us as to His thoughts; God is satisfied in His Son.

Two Aspects of Light

(a) As to Nature

Now light. Light has two aspects. Firstly, there is the aspect or sense of absolute purity, transparency, clearness, in nature. God is Light. "This is the message... that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all", and the explanation of that is what we read in 2 Corinthians 4 verse 2 - "We have renounced the hidden things of shame, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully"; no dishonesty, no craftiness, no deceitfulness, but, beholding, we "are transformed into the same image". It is Light.

The testimony of Jesus is committed to us. What does it mean in a practical way? To begin with, first of all, it means our nature, our character, being changed into the image of His Son. It means that God is dealing with us in the way in which He is dealing with us, with this object first of all: to get out of us all that deceitfulness that satan has put into us, the result of the deception of satan which brought Adam into darkness, to get it out of us, to get absolute purity of motive. Oh, that is tremendously searching and testing. What a deep work has to be done to get down to the bottom of that in us!

Only this One Whose eyes are as a flame of fire can pierce right down to the bottom of our motives: why that was said, why that was done, why that choice was made. Where did it come from? What prompted it? What were the interests which were being sought? What was the motive? It is very practical.

Is it not true that, in the hands of the Holy Spirit, that is one of our great lessons? If it is not, there is something wrong with our spiritual life if we are not being dealt with by the Lord in this matter so that we have a bad time when there is anything that is not absolutely true, anything that is exaggeration, pretence, (any kind of falsehood, or it can be put into numerous different words) but anything that is not absolutely pure and true, and about which there is something that is mixed, twisted, misrepresenting, or deceptive, that is of this world. The world is carried on on that basis, that is, the world governed by the prince of this world, and that is what he has done with us in our nature.

To be transformed into His image is to be transformed into Light. The Son of Man was made perfect through suffering, that is, established through all manner of testing, especially as to motives. I want you to look into the life of the Lord Jesus when He was here, as to motive. See how people tried to get Him to act on wrong motives, pretending they were right and good motives. Satan tried to get Him on the point of motive. He was tried on motive and established as perfect as to motive. Then, because of that, He is glorified, and what is the picture of glory? Well, in the transfiguration, you have a foreshadowing. "His garments became glistening, exceeding white, so as no fuller on earth can whiten them" (Mark 9:3). In the Revelation, there He is, His head and His hair as white wool - His motives, His thoughts, His ideas, the spring of everything - absolutely pure. He is in glory, His countenance as the sun shining in its strength. That is not just the coming upon of some glory, some aura; it is the natural, the inevitable outcome of the perfecting of nature.

I do not know whether you have ever seen a real saint pass into glory, one who has walked with God deeply. Oh, just at that moment afterward, you have seen a touch of it, a touch of glory, something so beautiful, so calm. It is only a faint thing, but there it is. If you have seen a sinner, who has rejected God again and again, and passes out in that rejection, you have seen something very different. I have seen both, and they are very different things. But that is a faint suggestion of this. The time is coming when this body of humiliation and corruption shall be made like unto the body of His glory (Phil. 3:21). What will have happened? The last trace of sin will have gone, the last trace of that darkness will have gone, it will all be Light.

If that is to be so (and remember this, it is not just a beautiful idea, it is the word of God) the most difficult thing for us who are so earthbound and time-bound to grasp, or to want to grasp very often, is that that is not only the coming to a blessed and glorious condition and state, it is vocation that is in view. The nations are to "walk in the light thereof" (Rev. 21:24). That is vocation.

Why does God not compromise at the end, and say that that is as much as we can dare hope for? Why does He not accommodate Himself and lower His standards? Because He is not sacrificing and giving up the instrument and vessel of an eternal vocation to serve Him. Therefore this high standard of spiritual life is required at the end. We are being forced to this, if we are under the hand of God, that a higher and still higher standard is required. He is still pressing for something more in this matter. He is dealing with us perhaps every day in the situations where He has placed us, just to try and get rid of this darkness, this duplicity, this contradiction and falsehood, this denial, this double element in us, this that is not all Light in the Lord. This conforming to the image of His Son is a very practical matter. This is the testimony.

While it begins with the individual, it passes to the churches, local companies, and then it passes to the whole Church, for revelation begins with the churches and ends with the Church, the new Jerusalem, the holy city (it is only the Church under another title), "Coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God; her light like unto a stone most precious, as it were a jasper stone, clear as crystal" (Rev. 21:10-11).

Now, do not look on this as Bible symbolism; this is the thing that is happening to us, and it pursues us into all our ways of life. Our relationships, our business dealings, our serving of our employers, our handling of our responsibilities, our living before men - is it perfectly honest and straight? Are we "commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God" (2 Cor. 4:3)? That is only this - "God is light and in Him is no darkness at all", and that is conveyed to us in His Son, and then from the Son by the Holy Spirit it is made possible in us, and the Holy Spirit gets to work upon us with that in view - Light.

It is not first of all whether we have light in the matter of truth, teaching. But first of all, do we have Light in the matter of character, nature, transparency, purity, absolute honesty? Do we profess to be something that we are not? Do we profess to stand in the good of something and we do not stand in the good of it? Have we got what we call 'the testimony' and are denying it? Then something has to be done. We shall be constantly brought to this place where we either abandon our position or come into line with it. Either I have taken on something that is far beyond me; I am not in it, and therefore I had better forsake that position altogether, or else come up to it. That is the challenge. What are you going to gain by abandoning it? You lose everything; once you start sliding backwards there is no end to that, you do not know where you will finish. There is only one thing to do: to go on, because God has set His goal and God has given His mighty Spirit to do this work in us. It may be slow, but, thank God, over a period of years, we are able to see how things which were not altogether straight with us at one time, have gone. He is doing it slowly, but He is doing it. This testimony of Jesus is practical.

(b) As to Truth

Then the other side, of course, is the matter of truth: Light as to truth over against error. John has a lot to say about that in this letter, e.g. Christ over against antichrist. I do not know what your thought of antichrist is. It is true that some horrible pictures are drawn of him even in the New Testament, but if you really saw him, you might mistake him for Christ, but for what John says here. It is in connection with antichrist that that word is used by John - "And as for you, the anointing which ye received of Him abideth in you, and ye need not that any one teach you; but... His anointing teacheth you concerning all things" (1 John 2:27). Do not take that out of its context and think that you do not need teaching, that you can be independent and get to know from the Lord for yourself, that you do not need counsel and guidance at all. That is misapplying Scripture. John is speaking about antichrist. "Even now have there arisen many antichrists" (1 John 2:18). "And this is the spirit of antichrist..." (1 John 4:3). Over against that, he says, 'You have an anointing, and that Spirit will tell you in the presence of antichrist.'

Antichrist does not merely mean against Christ, but over, alongside, Christ. And it is an imitation of Christ - calling down fire from heaven, doing mighty miracles like the Christ. If you saw antichrist, you might mistake him for Christ if you did not have this anointing teaching you, saying, 'That is not true, there is something spurious about that, something false.' It is the Spirit of Jesus witnessing to the truth, and I believe that operates not only as to antichrist in particular, but to all that is antichrist in detail, all that is not of Christ though it looks like Christ.

It is one of the great blessed laws that God has put in us His Spirit to witness in us that this is right, and this is not right, as to truth and error. The Spirit is in us to keep us in the Light and to save us from error, from going wrong. Oh, that God's people would learn this: that it is not necessary to live in fear of being misled and therefore in an atmosphere of suspicion, wondering whether this is 'sound' or not, whether they are going to be deceived by going here or there. That is an atmosphere not of Light, but of darkness! It has spread itself over so many of the Lord's people; they live in fear lest they be led astray. You have the remedy, you have the safeguard, you have the anointing to witness in your spirit without your having all the time to use your brain to weigh up the pros and cons and to come to some conclusion that the thing is more or less safe. No, the Spirit bears witness to the truth to keep you in the Light, for the Spirit is Light.

So Light has those two aspects, as to nature, and as to truth and error. And as I said in our previous meditation when I was speaking of these things, you cannot isolate Light, Life and Love. They are going to overflow. So many have tremendous 'light' but very little Life and Love; and true Light always goes hand in hand with Life and Love. They go together, so that what is true is living, it brings Life, and that is the test; not whether you can reason it out or not, but does it mean Life to me, does it increase my spiritual life, does it make me feel the love of God towards others? Then I am in a safe and sound place, it is alright to be there; there is nothing wrong with that. This is the testimony. It is very practical; it is very searching.

God's Need of Lampstands

To come back to the prophetic function, we are not going to call ourselves prophets, either individually or collectively, that is not the point. But we are here, in the testimony of Jesus, to function prophetically, that is, to keep God's full thought before His people. It is a great trust, a great requirement.

God needs the prophetic function very badly in these days. It is a day without prophets; we are tremendously exercised about this. It is a day in which we cannot discern outstanding prophets, men who have the message for the times, men who are able to say, "Thus says the Lord" to His people, men who can stand with the mind of God for the church. There was a time when there were prophets, individual prophets.

Now the thing that I am wondering about (I do not pass it on as a final, settled, conclusion or judgment, but for your thought) is whether, while the Lord withholds it from individuals because of the danger that is always associated with outstanding men (much more of God's work has been ruined along that line than we know, by foolish people making so much of men, dividing themselves up into human parties), may it not be that He is seeking to get people to function like that? May He not be seeking companies here and there on the earth who are fulfilling the prophetic function in the sense that they are keeping the Light of God's full thought before the people of God for all to see? If you want to know what God's thought is, there it is: they are the lampstands, they are corporate. And may that not be the explanation of the unmitigating, unrelenting activity of the devil to scatter the Lord's people?

Whenever the Lord begins to do something and to get something that is going to represent His fuller thought, the wolf gets in the middle, and by a spirit of disintegration, begins to scatter spiritually, if not physically: to divide and separate. And if not on real ground, then on phantom ground. The wolf comes to scatter (John 10:12). You can be scattered to the four winds of heaven while you are altogether in one place. Oh, may you have light for this to see the workings of darkness. What does it mean? Why these persistent assaults to get misunderstandings, misapprehensions? Why is it that among the most closely related of the Lord's people, satan never gives up the hope of dividing, causing distance, questions, criticisms, anything? It is because a vessel of Light holding God's fuller thought alive here in the earth represents the utter undoing of all the works of the devil.

So we come back to John - "To this end was the Son of God manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil" (1 John 3:8). That is the object of satan's activity: against the Light to bring in darkness; against Life to bring in death; against Love to bring in division. The Son of God was manifested to destroy the works of the devil. As a vessel of ministry, you will have to meet the persistent activity of satan to neutralise your light, your life, and your love. Is this not a challenge, is this not a call, is this not something more than holding certain doctrines and truths and interpretations of Scripture called 'the testimony'? This testimony of Jesus is a terrific thing, and all hell is out against it, and even to speak of it with any clearness is withstood, and we know it.

May the Lord just write in us, do something in us, about this. We have to make a start on this matter. Have you got suspicions, some division, some malice? Have you got something that is not straight and clear in your life, some wrong dealing, some false ways, some dishonesties, something that is not absolutely straight and square in the sight of God? If it is like that, we cannot claim to be in the testimony of Jesus. That has to be taken in hand.

We have to yield to the Lord and get these things put right, get the atmosphere clear, and our light will shine, it will blaze out. And then the Lord will have, where we are concerned, that to which He can point and say, "Do you want to know what I am thinking? There it is. Do you want to know Me? You will find Me there." May the Lord make that true.