The Veil Rent at Calvary

I want to do little else than read to you one verse, and I desire to lay stress upon the Greek words in it. The verse is 1 Thess. 5:23, and my attention has often been attracted to it by the misquotation of it. “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

The first thing the apostle does is to lay stress upon God’s personal agency in the sanctification of our life.

It begins “Himself, God,” the “autos” or “genesis”; the emphasis is on “Himself.” You may be sure that God is not going to hand over the work of the sanctification of your life to any inferior being. It is His own personal charge. God has come into your life, and whatever it costs you, God is never going to lay the work down to which He has put His hand, until He has carried it right through. God has come into your life, and. take heed, if you don’t yield to God, you will have to suffer, either personally or in your family, or in your circumstances. God is going to spare no pains to make you a good man, and if you don’t let God do it easily, you will have to suffer hardly. If you will let God do it with a silver knife, you will be spared from the gardener’s pruning iron; but God is set on bringing you to the likeness of His Son, and you cannot tamper, you cannot play with God.

You have said you are going to be good, and God has heard you say it, and He is going to make you good, either by fire or flood, or by sunshine and the still small voice. It is a very solemn thing when a man tells God that he wants to be good at any price. God undertakes instantly, and though you may pass on, apparently backsliding, in which you forget or ignore the vow that you entered into, God does not forget it. All the circumstances of your life turn round that moment, and you will have to come right; and every step you take along a forbidden path, you will have to come back to that path through an agony of blood and tears. But “God Himself”—the personality of God in the sanctification of the soul, through the Saviour and by the Spirit.

And He is the “God of Peace”—“Himself the God of Peace!” That is, He wants to bring you into harmony with Himself and the universe. You see there are various centres in the universe: there is the God-centre, and there is the spirit of evil centre; and if you are concentric (sharing the same centre) with evil, you are eccentric with God; and if you are concentric with God you are concentric with the universe, you are concentric with all holy beings everywhere, you are concentric with the great movements of Providence, you are concentric in every way with that which matters; but you are eccentric with the world. You cannot be concentric with God and concentric with the world, and you have got to choose whether you will be concentric with God and, therefore, eccentric with others. He is the God of peace. If you are concentric with God, you have the peace that emanates from God right through the universe; though outwardly there may be storm, inwardly there is the infinite peace, the silence of eternity.

“Make you holy”—I need not stay on that. It means “set you apart as a sacred thing that must not be touched, that must not be intruded upon.” It is tabooed to all evil; it is God’s: that God who should set you apart, as Israel was set apart among the nations, as the Sabbath was set apart among the days, as the priests were set apart among the ministering Levites. That is the soul should be set apart for God, purely for God’s use and for God’s enjoyment. Because God is thirsty, God must have love, and God needs the response of the soul, and He wants something from you. You are always talking as if you wanted all things from God, but it may be that God is quite eager for you to supply Him with something. He is thirsty and He, God “Himself,” God the centre of peace, “set you apart.”

And the next word is very important, “wholly.” It is a composite word, “holos” the whole, and “telos” the end. God will go to any length to set you apart at all-costs for Himself. God wants to set you apart from the blasting things of evil, so there will not be a path in your life that He cannot tread with you, that every part of your nature might be open to Him, having no part dark. Because darkness is not a thing, it is the negation of light; and therefore, there is no darkness in a heart in which God shines.

“Wholly . . . preserved blameless—unpruned.” Your nature is to be looked upon as an estate, purchased by Jesus Christ. Then he goes on to enumerate all this inheritance. It consists of three parts. Just as in an estate there is the surface of the earth with its trees and mountains and lakes and all that makes a park land; and then underneath it there is the precious metal it may be; and underneath that there may be layers of coal and iron; so your inheritance consists of three parts—there is the body, there is the soul underneath the body, and there is the spirit; and it is in that way the text is generally quoted. Very rarely do you have it quoted in the way in which it is written here. Men almost always say, body, soul, and spirit, but it is not that way at all. God says “spirit, soul and body,” and you and I are never going to get right until we adopt God’s order.

Compared to the tabernacle, the Holy of Holies is our spirit, the Holy place our soul, and the outer courtyard our body.

When the Tabernacle was first constructed, the Holy of Holies was dark. Every man and woman has a body, every man and woman has a soul, every man and woman has the capacity to be spiritually minded; but the spirit, before we are regenerated, is like a dark chamber. The unregenerate man has got a spirit capacity, but it is as yet destitute of the vitalizing Spirit of God. It is a dark chamber, and it is dead to God. But when this Tabernacle was constructed, you remember, the Lord’s shekinah glory did not come in through the outer Court, it came in this way, through the Holy of Holies; and it shone over the ark. It was the shekinah, the light of God that filled the Holy of Holies, that shone through the Veil and flooded the Holy Place, so that the priest could not minister there, and it poured out in a perfect cascade of glory until the whole place was illuminated above the glory of the sun.

Now that is what regeneration means: when a man is regenerated, the dark spirit becomes illuminated by the coming in of the Holy Spirit, and there is born into him a life which is not his, but which is Jesus Christ’s, and which Christ achieved by His death and resurrection. For the life of Christ is a composite life: it is the humanity with a great plus added to; the Deity that He had with the Father before the world was. Directly a man is regenerated, the Holy Spirit brings the life of the Eternal Christ, which is Deity plus the experience of temptation, plus the experience of Gethsemane, plus the victory of Calvary, plus the open grave, plus the ascension glory. And all that is in the one germ of life which is communicated to the spirit of man by the Spirit of God, and Christ begins to be formed in him. Then the indwelling power of that light goes into his soul, so that he begins to think with a new clearness and he has moral apprehensions which he never had before. That is, his conscience becomes illuminated with the Spirit’s power, and through the man’s soul—the Holy Place—his whole body—the outer Court—becomes dominated.

You see, Regeneration is the Spirit of God in the spirit of man. The Spirit bears witness with our spirit. That is, your spirit does not become submerged, so to speak, it does not become annihilated. Your spirit is called into active co-operation with the Spirit of God. One is not to be an automaton, but to co-operate and be in sympathy with the movements of the Spirit of God within the spirit. Then, as I say, it pours through the soul, and it dominates the body. I think that probably this is the secret of health. I realise that there is a great deal to be said about spiritual healing, but it is all along that line.

This is the point: There are three stages of Christian experience. There is first the stage of the unregenerate man who is soul and body; he has the capacity of the spirit; but the spirit has never been impregnated with the Spirit of God. Then there comes the second stage, where you have again the body and again the soul, but you now have the Spirit of God like the Shekinah shining in the spirit; and that man is a regenerate man. But in this stage, it is still possible that a heavy veil hangs between the Holy of Holies, and the Holy Place; and that veil is so heavy that, though man may be regenerate, the soul life remains independent of the spirit life.

But when Jesus died the veil of the Temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom. When you apprehended your identification with the dying Christ, your veil was rent from the top to the bottom. When the veil is rent in the act of death, or in identification with Christ in His death, when it is rent from top to bottom then, for the first time, the Spirit of God, who has been in the spirit all the while, has an opportunity of radiating the soul in all its emotions, and ultimately of radiating through the life.

It is our duty to hold forth Calvary and the torn veil in such a way that the veil over the souls should be rent in twain by the intervention of Divine Hands. The soul cannot tear its own veil. God must tear it with His invisible Hand, and when that is rent all the rest will follow. Though just as our spirit co-operates with the Holy Spirit, so the soul cooperates with God, and the body must be in constant obedience and co-working with God’s Spirit. So then as the apostle says: “I pray God that your spirit, soul and body be preserved blameless;” the whole man should be a dwelling place which should be occupied by Jesus Christ.