The Opened Heaven

by T. Austin-Sparks

Chapter 2 - Our Heavenly Union With the Lord Jesus

Reading: Col. 2:8-15, 20-23; 3:1-11; 1:13.

"Jesus answered and said unto him, Because I said unto thee, I saw thee underneath the fig tree, believest thou? Thou shalt see greater things than these. And He saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye shall see the heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man" (John 1:50,51).

We take up the matter again and I am strongly constrained to seek to deal with things in a very simple way and to keep near the beginning and foundation of things.

Firstly, we simply remark that it is made very clear by abundant evidence in the Word of God, both in the Old and the New Testaments, that the Lord's thought for His own people is that they should be a heavenly people and that not as in the hereafter alone, but as here and now. The Old Testament makes that very plain by all its types and its symbols. There is a sense in which the Old Testament is bound up with that one truth. It seems to be the theme of the Old Testament if the Old Testament is considered along one line: the Lord's thought for His people revealed that they should be a people not reckoned among the nations. One of the profoundest things in the life of the Jews is that statement. There are many theories about, but that statement goes to the root of matters, that that people, in the Lord's own declaration was, and is, to be a people not reckoned among the nations. And as we have said, all the trouble in the Old Testament arises out of a violation of that divine law and issues from a failure to wholly grasp, accept, and establish unalterably that divine law. And what was true in Old Testament times has proved true in New Testament times.

The amount of evidence in the New Testament as to that divine truth, that the Lord's people are called here and now on this earth, in this world, to be a heavenly people has not been observed, held to, or established, and all the trouble has arisen out of that violation, or that failure to apply the law, "Not reckoned among the nations". But of course, it has ever and always been, in both dispensations, the cost associated with such a position which has led to its being ignored, or violated and set aside, for such a position does represent a very great cost indeed. Our purpose for the moment is just to come back and reaffirm the fact.

You and I, beloved, have never arrived at a true understanding of what it means to be a child of God, until we have recognised something of the fulness of the meaning bound up with that truth, that we are not reckoned among the peoples of the earth when once we become children of God; that we are no longer of this world, which means that we are wholly, fully, utterly of heaven, spiritually. Many of the Lord's people find it their greatest difficulty to understand how that can be. They are still in a Nicodemus condition: "How can these things be?" (Jn. 3:9). "Here we are; we are on this earth and we are in this world. We have to pursue our business here and do our work here. We have to be in close contact with all that is going on in this world, and we are very largely subject to the things which govern this world. How can we be a heavenly people? What does it mean to be in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus? That may be an idealistic state, that may be something very beautiful as a thought and an idea, but it is not practical; it is unreal!"

Now, it is to seek to dismiss any such uncertainty that the Lord is bringing us to this word, and I think will, perhaps a little more as we go on in these messages, show to us that whatever may be our difficulties, it is nevertheless not one whit the less true that we are a heavenly people, and that ours is a heavenly life, a heavenly vocation, and that everything which is most real for us is of a heavenly character. All this is the desire of the Lord to get us to our true position, to understand really what our life is. And I feel that there is something of divine wisdom and strategy in the Lord emphasising such a word as this in these days.

Perhaps never before in the history of this world has it been borne in upon people that to try and reconstruct this world as a cosmos Utopia, is a hopeless outlook. We have given it up. I suppose man will pursue that endeavour to the end, but it is a forlorn hope. You may call that a counsel of despair, you may speak of such words as the uttermost pessimism. Well, if you do, it only means that you are earth-bound, for those who are heaven-bound speak in that way out of the deepest optimism, for we feel that the sooner things are wound up here the better. That is the only way of salvation. But it is being pressed home upon us with a forcefulness unparalleled in history, that it is better to be attached to heaven than to earth, and that it is necessary for us to be attached to heaven rather than to earth, and that the people who are attached to earth are in for a bad time and the people who are attached to heaven are in for a good time. But the difference is being emphasised and intensified, and the Lord would be saying to His people in such days as these: "Come out My people, come out from among them; realise the meaning of your heavenly citizenship and commonwealth, enter wholly into all the meaning of your having become translated into the kingdom of the Son of My love."

The only hopeful look today is the upward look, and the Lord said a greater thing than perhaps has been recognised when speaking of these things coming to pass, He said: "And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh" (Lk. 21:28, AV). "Your way out is coming", but that is in a day when, as the context points out, the nations see no way out. "Distress of nations" (v.25) literally means: "no way out". "Lift up your eyes, your way out is coming."

Therefore, beloved, unto the ultimate issue, the consummation which draws near - Jacob's trouble has commenced. In a way in which perhaps it would never have come about before, by sheer political force and racial animosity the Jews are being forced by ten thousands back to their own country. These things are happening before our eyes, but towards the ultimate issue which draws near so rapidly, the Lord would intensify His emphasis in our hearts upon our heavenly life, the nature of our life as a heavenly one, and show us what it is to live under an opened heaven, and how we must live under an opened heaven.

Having brought that fresh stress as to the fact that the Lord has made it clear through all His Word through two long dispensations, that His people are in His own thought a heavenly people, we come to the first practical factor in this whole matter so far as we are concerned, and that is:

The Fact of Christ in Heaven.

That is a tremendous fact. That is a comprehensive and all-inclusive fact; that the Lord Jesus is in heaven.

We are very fond of enunciating principles because we feel it is a quick way to get to a lot of things; if you have got a principle, you have got everything in germ, and the fact that the Lord Jesus is in heaven embodies a principle. It is a principle which has been, in the hands of God, a dynamic in every age. It is a dynamic principle. Some of you may not quite know what we mean by dynamic. Well, we say simply for you that it is the Greek word of which our English is dynamite, and it means driving power, or explosive force, if you like. It means something with power in it, power to accomplish things. And dynamite does accomplish things when it gets going, and this is a dynamic principle in the hands of God. It has been used in all ages to accomplish tremendous things.

When God has moved out from time to time with His stages towards His ultimate purpose, every time this has been His principle. Concerning His first step with Abraham, it says: "The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham" (Acts 7:2). "The God of glory appeared" - there is your dynamic principle. Because the God of glory appeared unto Abraham, everything else followed: Abraham went out. Abraham's faith was based upon that, everything that ensued in his life arose from the fact that the God of glory had appeared unto him.

In a further step of advance with Jacob, the God of glory appeared unto Jacob. He lighted upon a certain place, the sun went down, and he took a pillar from that place, a stone, and he lay down and he dreamed, "Behold, a ladder set up above the earth, the top of it reached unto heaven..." and he beheld the angels of God ascending and descending, and above it stood the Lord. The dynamic principle - in relation to that, everything afterwards in the history of Jacob which was worthwhile, transpired.

When He would pursue His course with Israel, He appeared unto Moses, the God of glory (in a bush), burnt not [and said], "I AM". Later in the development of that purpose, Moses, Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up into the mountain. They saw the God of Israel and under His feet a paved work, crystal clear, transparent as sapphire. Out of that came the whole Jewish economy - God moving on.

That part of the history passed, the days of the prophets entered because now recalling the people of God and not constituting them is the divine object in view. And the Lord laid His hand upon a young man who received a call and his commission and his equipment in the day when he saw the Lord high and lifted up and His train filling the temple. The God of glory appeared unto Isaiah - the dynamic principle.

Later, Ezekiel, a man who had to go to a hardened people concerning whom the Lord said to this servant: "Son of man, go, get thee unto the house of Israel, and speak with My words unto them. For thou art not sent to a people of a strange speech and of a hard language, but to the house of Israel; not to many peoples of a strange speech and of a hard language, whose words thou canst not understand. Surely, if I had sent thee to them, they would hearken unto thee. But the house of Israel will not hearken unto thee; for they will not hearken unto Me: for all the house of Israel are of a hard forehead and of a stiff heart. Behold, I have made thy face hard against their faces, and thy forehead hard against their foreheads. As an adamant harder than flint have I made thy forehead" (Ezek. 3:4-9). That was a difficult task, no light, easy undertaking. Unto that something is necessary. Read Ezekiel chapter 1 again; just read where that first chapter ends: "And above the firmament... the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone; and upon the likeness of the throne was a likeness as the appearance of a man upon it above..." (Ezek. 1:26). The rainbow throne, the sapphire stone - the glory of the Lord. God's dynamic principle, you see, in relation to every movement. You will be able to trace other similar instances in the Old Testament.

You come to the New Testament. What was it that constituted Pentecost and all its wonderful outcome? It was Christ in glory. You can gather it all up into that: Christ in glory. He had been by the right hand of God exalted, glorified. The Holy Spirit had come as the Spirit of the exalted, glorified Christ, and those men on the earth entered into the realization of what Christ in glory meant, into the realisation of the fact that Christ was in glory, and their first message was a message about His being exalted to be a Prince and a Saviour, and by the right hand of God exalted. God's dynamic law, but oh, the wonderful outcome! He has still another step to take, for His purpose is still unfolding and enlarging all the time, and He has to reach now beyond the bounds of earth, far beyond the limits of an earthly people, to the heavens. He must have an instrument to bring in the revelation of His eternal heavenly fulness.

Saul of Tarsus is that foreknown and fore-chosen instrument. How does the Lord secure His instrument? By His dynamic law - Christ in glory revealed. This has the effect every time. But oh, what a far-reaching effect it was, how far it carried; what it meant of support, of strength, of grace, of understanding. How utterly did it deliver from the tyranny of this world!

Christ in Glory - God's Dynamic Law

We must pray more and more for the Lord to reveal to our hearts what Christ in heaven means; that He is there, and that His being there carries with it such tremendous issues for us. Christ is on the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens. Do we believe that? Not always as we should. Well now, if that is true, that is going to lead to this fact, that if we are joined livingly with the Lord Jesus, ours is essentially a heavenly life, and we are a heavenly people. We must see how that is so, the fact is there.

How did the Lord Jesus get there? Now, in relation to the Lord Jesus getting there the Scriptures have the strongest things to say which they contain on any subject. The Scriptures have some strong things to say on various matters, but they have nothing so strong as the things which they say about the Lord Jesus and His being exalted to the heavens.

There is no stronger word than this, I think: "the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe, according to that working of the strength of His might which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, and made Him to sit at His right hand in the heavenlies, far above all rule, and authority, and power, and dominion..." (Eph. 1:19-21). The exceeding greatness of His power was exerted, put forth, in accomplishing that.

Let us just contemplate some of the simple expressions of divine power in the Scriptures and see what they accomplished. One angel going out against the mighty host of Sennacherib and in the morning, they were all dead corpses. One angel. The exceeding greatness of God's power was put forth in raising the Lord Jesus from among the dead to that position. Well, that means that there are some realms in which God has, speaking humanly, a task, or had a task, realms which call for an expression of His exceeding great power. What were those realms?

Well, simply to begin with: sin. All the combined force of all the men and women that have ever walked on this earth directed against the problem of sin, could never solve it or break it. Every child of Adam, since he fell, has wrestled without success with the problem of sin. I am not talking to you about sins, I am talking about sin. You may get the better of some bad habits, you may be able to overcome some things which you call sins, but I am talking about sin: a law, a nature. When God raised the Lord Jesus from among the dead, He fully, wholly broke the power of sin, sin in all its long history unbroken by all the struggles and anguish of human hearts. In an act He broke the power of sin. We sing joyfully, but we do not know all the power that lay behind it: "He breaks the power of cancelled sin."

Moreover, when He raised the Lord Jesus from among the dead, He dealt with all the otherwise impossible problem of humanity - human nature, man, flesh - whatever you like to call it, He broke the back of that thing, overcame it and set it aside. Mark you, He did it in a Man. That is the mighty thing about this. I do not mean that the human nature of Jesus Christ was a fallen human nature, but I do mean that in the hour of Christ's cross, He accepted as lighting upon Him all the weakness of man, and in the hour of all human weakness, all the power of sin (not His own). But God triumphed in Him in both those realms, in a Man. Oh, but that is not all. That is only the second thing.

There is the world. There is that which is in man, and there is that which man is in himself as broken, then encompassing him is the world. (I am not going to stay to define that, but I just mention it). And you and I know something at least, of the inimical animosity that is the world in spirit, towards the Lord Jesus and the children of God.

When I speak of the world for the moment, I do not mean the people of the world, I do not merely mean the sphere, the place; I mean, by "the world" that spirit which governs, rules and operates. Immediately you seek in any way to infect it with the light, the truth, the righteousness, the purity and the integrity of Christ in its commercial, its industrial department, you meet something. It makes you realise that it is almost, if not altogether, impossible to be an out-and-out Christian in business life. If you do, you stand to suffer, you meet something there which is deeper than man's consciousness. There is a spirit. When the Lord said that He had overcome the world, "and this is the victory that hath overcome the world, even our faith" (1 John 5:4), this was not just speaking about overcoming men, He was speaking about overcoming a spiritual system deeply rooted in the order of this world which the children of God encounter at every point. He met that in His cross and overcame it.

We are moving on to see what the Lord makes possible by being in heaven for us while here. And yet that is not all. Encompassing the world, the kingdom of darkness: "the whole world lieth in the evil one" says the Word (1 John 5:19), and man lies in the world. He is trebly a prisoner. That encompassing kingdom of satan and darkness is a very real thing, but only real to the children of God in any adequate way. Try and escape the world, try and escape death, and you will discover how real they are.

You may think it would be an easy thing to be a Christian in this world until you have tried it, and then like most others, you will discover that at every turn in the road you are tempted to compromise to avoid the cost, and to have it a little easier. And the more you go on with the Lord, which means the higher you go, the more you will find that which is of the world and of the kingdom of darkness set against you, and you will discover that it is in many of the Lord's children of whom you would never have suspected such a thing. Yes, devoted children of God, when you want to go right on to an utter life according to God's mind, devoted children of God, being your chief obstacle. It is a very real thing.

The tragedy is (this is the thing you and I have to come to see clearly) that the enemy finds his occasion so often by the children of God because they are not living a heavenly life. Yes, the enemy has his strength in children of God who have still some relationship, either with the world or with the old order of man, or with some sin allowed, or with the enemy himself taking advantage, of course, by reason of their link with the world, or the flesh, their sin. It is a terrible thing to think that you and I can be very useful to the devil by not recognising that Christ in heaven implies that we are utterly, fully, completely cut off from all that appertains to the old creation. Any kind of link or fellowship, touch or harmony with that against which the heavenly position of the Lord Jesus stands, means occasion for the enemy, and too often that occasion is found in the children of God themselves.

But stepping back - when God raised Him from the dead, He put forth exceeding great power to destroy every one of those realms. Oh, that was a tremendous business. Sin, man, the world, the kingdom of satan - broken, destroyed by the exceeding greatness of God's power when He raised Him from the dead and set Him at His own right hand.

That is what lay behind Christ in heaven. That exceeding great power is said to be to our account: "to us-ward who believe" (Eph. 1:19). What then is the direction of the power of God and the exceeding greatness of His power? To get a people living a heavenly life. Why do you want power? To do something on the earth? The Lord wants, first of all, that you have power to be something in the heavens now. Yes, God's power is put forth to get a heavenly thing; something wholly related to His Son in heaven. And when we come into our heavenly life, there is a power operating behind us which has no equal in this universe. Oh, that is the romance of the New Testament. "For ye see your calling, brethren, that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called..." (1 Cor. 1:26).

Go back to your book of the Acts and you do not see many of the great ones of this world, those who had great world power, coming in. If they did, they soon lost it when they came in. But what you do see is something irresistible, something impregnable, something indestructible, something which is mightier than the mighty Roman empires, something before which all the other realms and forces have to give way. It is not the people that they come down before, it is the power behind them. It is the exceeding greatness of His power which had already dealt with them. Why? A simple people in this world, living a heavenly life in touch with the Throne, they are the eternal people who will be when all others are gone for ever.

But now, to come for the moment to some point where we can conclude, how was it done? How did He reach heaven? How shall we reach heaven now? How can you and I come now, while on this earth, to be in heaven? How can we know in truth that even while sojourning here and meeting all that we have to meet in this world, we are a heavenly people, we are out of it, we are free from it, our destiny is not bound up with it? How? Well, simply: "Ye died..." (Col. 3:3).

Man by nature, as we have him before he has come into living relationship with the Lord Jesus, is locked up in the kingdom of darkness (we say nothing about his state for the moment) spirit, soul and body in darkness, alienated from the life of God, in the authority of satan whose destiny is bound up with the destiny of a judged and condemned world. But what is to happen? Well, that man locked up has to be liberated. Something has to be done in him to deliver him from darkness into the kingdom of the Son of God's love. He has to be delivered from the world; he has to be delivered from the kingdom of satan, as he has to be delivered from himself and his natural state.

How shall it be done? "We may not climb the heavenly steeps...", we cannot climb out of this cage; no effort of ours will ever bring about our emancipation. What has to be done is, that somehow or other we must come into an immediate living link with Christ in glory, and we must come into this world as those who have come out from heaven.

How shall that be? Well, the only way is to die, and be born in another place. The beginning of everything for us is to die; this is not the end of everything, but the beginning of everything. We have said before, the quickest, best way out of this mess is to die. Do not take that literally - but it is true in the spiritual sense, the only way out is by death. And then we must be born again, and we must not be born in the old state, in the old place, in the old conditions, in the old bondage. We must be born outside of it: be born with freedom, and with great cost that freedom is obtained, but not a cost to us. Well, it is simply faith's acceptance of Christ's death as ours.

We have seen the mighty thing to which He died, but the death of Christ is such a tremendous thing. It is death in His death. It is not death in Adam's death. Yes, we all died in Adam: "For as in Adam all die..." (1 Cor. 15:22). We have all died in Adam. What is the difference between Adam's death and Christ's death? We are not told that we are to accept our death in Adam. Nowhere are we exhorted to make Adam's death our death. It is taken for granted that in Adam we died. But we are exhorted to make Christ's death our death.

What is the difference? Well, Adam could do no saving work by dying. His dying was because of condemnation and judgment. He was hopeless and helpless in himself. There was no alternative, no way out for him. We are in that by nature. But Christ's death is a different thing altogether. Christ's death is not a death unto death, it is a death over death, a death to conquer death, and death to conquer all that made for and led to death.

The first Adam died a death in which there was no power of recovery. The Last Adam died a death in which there was the mighty power of infinite God unto recovery. Adam's death is hopeless; Christ's death is the full orbed hope of glory. There is a vast difference between these two. Adam's death was not a death unto a condition of sin and bondage; it was a death in a condition of sin and bondage. Christ's death was a death which He accepted voluntarily, unto sin and bondage, and then when God raised Him, sin and bondage were destroyed because of Who He was, as One in Whom sin was not inherent. And it was impossible, therefore, for Him to be held by the pangs of death. It is the acceptance of Christ's death as our death; I want you to see that to accept our death in Adam does not offer us anything at all, we have got to accept it whether we want to or not, but there is no way through there, no hope at all. To accept our death in the Lord Jesus is to accept something which has secured for us all that Adam both lost, and never attained unto. Oh, the mighty power of Christ's death!

Have you accepted the double death? Yes, I know I am dead by nature in trespasses and sins, dead in Adam's death, which is a hopeless situation; but there is another thing for me to accept, which is death in Christ's death where all that appertains to Adam is all dealt with and put away. It is a death on top of a death, to destroy the death underneath. By faith we accept that. Oh, that we had seen more of what it means; oh, that the Lord's people were seeing more of what it means! Oh, that every young convert saw what it means, that henceforth that whole realm is broken open for them and something is introduced which represents Christ's triumph as a positive factor over the whole realm of death! Something is brought in which means that no longer can they have any voluntary contact or fellowship with any of that.

If we saw the meaning of our new birth, of our death with Christ, then that ugly phrase which is always a contradiction in terms, "a worldly Christian", would never have a place. There is no such thing from God's standpoint as a worldly Christian. That is a denial of Christ. That is a denial of His death, of His resurrection, of the meaning of His being in heaven. No one can rightly apprehend what it means, that Christ is in heaven, and be worldly. His being there means that that whole realm called "the world", as a spiritual thing, has been broken, and rather than cling to it and want bits of it, they are glad to escape it and be out of it. The whole thing is nauseating. I do hope that you young Christians have come to the place where the world, to you, is obnoxious, that if you have to go into it, you feel it is horrible and you say: "Oh, for the time to be able to get out of this". We do know that.

We travel in this world upon these ships and in these hotels and there is such a clash of spirit. You know it. And yet there are believers, children of God who want to have a bit of it. There is some contradiction to the work of Christ in their lives. The call to be utterly in fellowship with the Lord Jesus in heaven is an essential call unto translation when the Lord comes.

The consignment of the Christian life is bound up with its initiation. Its initiation is that in death union with the Lord Jesus by faith, there is in resurrection union given to us that which is of Christ in heaven, to make us heavenly. The Cross of the Lord Jesus cuts through all realms and opens a way for His divine Life and Spirit presence to come right down into the very spirit of the born from above child of God and the same Life as is in Him now in glory, is in the child of God here in this world. And it is not a separate Life, a bit broken off and put down here; it is linked by the Holy Spirit - one Life. But it ever demands for its triumph in us, for its effective working in us, that the Cross shall be maintained between us and the flesh, the world, and the devil.

Now, we have only put in perhaps other words familiar things, and started to indicate how we come to be a heavenly people, but beloved, if you have not seen it before, do not take it as an interesting presentation of truth. If you have heard it many times before, do not say: "Well, we know that". So much is bound up for us all with this. You and I, moving to the great final issue of our heavenly union with the Lord Jesus, will need and we shall be driven to know our need, of a heavenly union and fellowship with Christ, and of heavenly resources to live our life down here. It is going to become more and more difficult, impossible to live here in this world without the Lord Jesus, without heavenly resources.

Just take the Lord's Word to your heart. There is always a place for a new transaction. Some of us have come to the place from time to time, and very often that means doing over again a thing that has been done before with a new meaning because a new meaning has been put into it. The Lord is calling us now to live our heavenly life, to be His heavenly people through whom His heavenly power can function in the spiritual realm.

It is necessary for you and I to die ever more deeply in that one death, and live more fully in that one Life, and to keep the Cross between us and ourselves and sin, and the world, as something which we voluntarily choose, and between the enemy whose ground of advantage is the world when we accept a bit of it, when we let it in. It is not just sinners that are involved in this. There is so much of the work of God which is governed by worldly principles and therefore it fails. There is so much which has the spirit of the world in it. I am not thinking of externals, I am thinking of principles, the way the world does things, the line upon which the world works. And these have come into the work of God with the result that the enemy has gained a footing to make all kinds of mischief, bringing arrest and dishonour to the Lord. Everything must be cut off by that Cross from all ground of the enemy if it is to wholly express the mind of the Lord.