THROUGH THE ETERNAL SPIRIT.
Hebrews 9: 14 How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the Eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the Living God?
Continuing with the SEVENTH SECTION
Hebrews 9: 1-28.
The Power of Christ's Blood to inaugurate the New Sanctuary and the New Covenant.
BY THE REV. ANDREW MURRAY
One might well ask for the reason why the Blood of Christ, which has such infinite power in conquering sin and death and in Opening Heaven to Christ and to us, does not exercise a mightier influence even in earnest Christians, in cleansing our heart and lifting us into a life in the joy of God's presence. The first answer must be, that we seek too little for a real insight into its Divine and Infinite intrinsic worth. The Blood of the Heavenly Son, shed in the Power of the Eternal Spirit, could not but again return heavenward: as God's Spirit leads us by faith to gaze on its Authority and power in Heaven, and to see how through all Heaven its Power is manifest, we shall learn to expect and to receive its working to keep us in God's presence, in an Authority and power above all that thought can conceive. The same Eternal Spirit, through whom the Blood-shedding took place, will effect in us the Bloods-sprinkling too, and make us indeed partakers of what it has accomplished in God's presence above.
This is are lesson of the utmost consequence. If the Blood is His who offered Himself to God through the Eternal Spirit, if it is in the Power and Life of that Spirit that the Blood was brought into Heaven, and now has its place there, we may be sure that that Spirit will ever work with and in that Blood. There are three that bear witness on earth: the Spirit and the water and the Blood. The Spirit and the Blood must and will ever go together. We must not limit our faith in the Power of the Blood in our heart to what we can understand. Our faith must ever be enlarging, to expect that the Holy Spirit, according to His hidden but almighty and uninterrupted working, can maintain the Heavenly efficacy of the Blood in a way to us inconceivable. Just as Christ is the visible revelation on earth and in heaven of the invisible God, so the Holy Spirit again is the communication of the Life and Redemption of the unseen Christ. The Holy Spirit is the power of the inner Life. Within us, down in the to ourselves inaccessible depths of our being, He is able, as the Eternal Spirit, to maintain, in them that yield to Him, the Divine Power of the Blood to cleanse from sin and to give abiding access to the presence of God. Let him who would know to the full the mighty, the Divine, the inexpressible Power and Blessing the Blood each moment can bring in him, remember, it was through the Eternal Spirit it was shed.
In connection with this there is still another lesson. The Spirit not only applies the Power of the Blood, but in doing so He reveals its spiritual meaning. The Blood has its value, not from the mere act of physical suffering and death, but from the inner Life and disposition that animated (New Life impartation that is found in) Christ in shedding it. It is the Blood of the Lamb who offered Himself without blemish to God, with which our heart is brought into a Divine and Living contact. Self-offering, self-sacrifice, was the disposition of which the Blood was the expression, and from which alone it had its worth. Where the Eternal Spirit communicates the Power of the Blood, He communicates this disposition. Christ humbled Himself and became Obedient to death. Therefore as the Lamb of God, who gave His Blood, He was the embodiment of meekness, and humility, and submissive surrender to God's Will. It was our pride and self-will that was the very root and life of sin in us, in our flesh: as we are now washed in the Blood of the Lamb, His Spirit of meekness and submissiveness and obedience will work in us, because the same Eternal Spirit, through which the Blood was shed, applies it in our hearts. We know what it means to wash our clothes in water, how they are plunged into it and saturated with it, until the water carries off all defilement. The Blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin, because the Eternal Spirit imparts the very Life and power of which that precious Blood-shedding was the outcome and the fruit. This is the power that cleanses the conscience from dead works to serve the Living God. Not the Blood only, as shed upon earth, as the first object of our faith for pardon, but the Blood as shed through the Eternal Spirit, and Glorified in the Spirit Life of Heaven, brings us truly into the inner Sanctuary, and empowers us to serve Him as the Living God. "As nothing but the Eternal Spirit could have overcome or redeemed fallen nature, as Christ took it upon Him, so nothing can possibly overcome or redeem the fallen soul or body of any child of Adam, but that same overcoming and Redeeming Spirit, really Living and acting in it, in the same manner as it did in the humanity of Christ."
We live in the dispensation of the Spirit of Grace--- the Spirit of God's Son, who has been sent for this into our heart. It is the dispensation of the inner Life, in which we are brought into the inner Sanctuary, the secret of His presence, and the inner Sanctuary is found within us,--- in that secret inner place which none but God's Spirit can search out ( and restore us to our former undefiled condition within us, our awakened spirit). In that hidden depth is the House God had prepared for Himself; there, in the inner man, the Holy Spirit will reveal, in a way that our senses and reason cannot apprehend, the Power of Christ's Blood to Cleanse and bring God nigh. Oh! Let us believe the infinite mysteries with which we are surrounded. And above all, this mystery too, that within us, the Blood of Christ, the Lamb of God--- that mystery of mysteries--- is being applied and kept in full action by the Eternal Spirit, cleansing us (our spirit being the inner man of the heart) and revealing God's presence in us.
1. What a mystery! What blessedness! A heart sprinkled with the Blood of the Son of God! To walk before God day by day with the Blood of His Son upon us! To know that the Lamb of God sees us washed In His own blood! Oh, we need, let us ask, the Eternal Spirit to make all this clear to us.
2. If our faith Is only to believe what our reason can make clear to us no wonder the power of the Blood effects so little. Let us have faith, not In what we understand, but let us have faith In God, and the Heavenly, the Inexpressibly glorious realities, of the Blood and Spirit of the Son. By allowing the Eternal Spirit to cause us to become receptive of the mysteries hid in Christ Jesus.
3. What a tender, careful, holy fear comes upon a soul that Lives In the full and Living consciousness of the Blessed reality a heart sprinkled with the Blood of the Lamb.
4. Beware of trying to comprehend all that the Blood means, or of being discouraged when you fail of doing so. The Blood in Heaven is a Divine and inscrutable (hard to understand) mystery and power: be content to believe in Its efficacy. When the Holy Spirit comes Into the heart in power, He applies the Blood in a power far beyond what we can think or understand.
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