22. The Cross in Deuteronomy
The Cross in Deuteronomy
We come to Deuteronomy, and what is the message of Deuteronomy? Deuteronomy 30:19 says (and there is one word in it that sums up the whole book), “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.” The message of Deuteronomy is that word “choose.” That is the great word of the book, “choose,” with all its forms.
Moses has been telling the people of Israel of God’s choice of them and all that it means, and then, as he comes to the end of his witness to the faithfulness and love of God, his message to his people is, “Now you choose. Two paths are open to you, and it is your will that has to decide.” In the Christian life and work the teaching of the Holy Spirit is that the great decisive factor in the conflict is our will. You can see how that is emphasized in the New Testament. How often you come across something like this: “Yield yourself unto God. Present your body unto God. Glorify God in your body and in your spirit,” all showing that these are the actions of your will, deliberately faced and deliberately done. Your will and mine are only safe when they are in cooperation with the Holy Spirit.
Now will you notice this: When God asks the surrender of our will it does not mean that we drop our will. Dropping one’s will always engenders passivity, passivity of mind, passivity of spirit, passivity of will; and that is one of the great perils of these days. The dropping of the will is the essential condition for Satanic working. Passivity of the will, the mind, the spirit is an essential condition for Satanic working. If a man is to go in for spiritism today he simply drops everything and becomes an empty machine into which the spirits of evil rush and take possession of him. Satan with all his marvelous ingenuity gets alongside, and is getting alongside, of Christian people today and playing upon their very desire to be true to God, and he is saying to them, “You know if you are to reach that life of holiness you must drop your will.” The result of dropping the will is that Christians are becoming afflicted with the awful disease of passivity, and you find it everywhere.
People come to my wife and to myself and say, “You know that is just how we are. We do not seem to be able to pray, we do not seem to be able to do anything today. We are being driven up into a corner, being hedged around, and there is nothing in us.” There is nothing more perilous in these awful days than getting into this condition of passivity of mind and will and spirit. Satan requires the absolute consent and surrender of a man’s will in order to do his work. Notice that God requires the same thing: the absolute surrender of your will and life, but not to become passive, instead to become active. That is where the difference comes in. Satan causes their passivity, God demands activity of your will, activity of your spirit, activity of your life in cooperation with the Holy Spirit. When our Lord Jesus Christ was in the Garden of Gethsemane He was completely master of His own will, so that He was able to say, “Thy will be done.” He put His will alongside of the Father’s will, and entered into cooperation with His Father for the purpose of carrying out those great divine tasks. And cooperation with the Holy Spirit always entails watchfulness, perfect obedience, prayerfulness, and the use of all God-provided means.
I do pray you to remember this, that the Holy Spirit always makes us intelligent. He never makes us foolish or fanciful. He never leads us to take false steps. He never carries us into the region of fiction. That is what the devil is doing today with multitudes of people, but the Holy Spirit always works along the line of intelligence The thing He wants to do with Christian people today is to make them sane and well balanced.
I do not need to tell you that that is one of the things we are requiring to look for very much, that we keep well balanced in relation to truth and in relation to everything else. The Holy Spirit does that. And how are we to cooperate? How is this cooperation brought about? Just as the Holy Spirit works in the purpose of the cross to our lives. He never works apart from the cross. What does the cross do? It is meant to touch with death every force in you and me which is evil and natural, that belongs to the old nature and that is constantly at work asserting its supremacy over the supremacy of Jesus Christ, and therefore hindering the Holy Spirit from doing His work. That is why Calvary always sends us to Pentecost, and Pentecost always sends us back to Calvary.
We never can get away from the cross. The moment you get away from the cross your feet are on slippery places, and as the Holy Spirit works in the death purpose of the cross He works in, as well, the life purpose. And so we reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive unto God.