From Realm to Realm

The only life you know is the life that you have lived, and it’s the world to which you are accustomed. But there are worlds within worlds. Oh, sure, we have only one Earth. But in that one Earth are many countries and many different terrains, climates, cultures, languages, religions, and kinds of people. If you go into just one apartment building, how many different worlds are there within that building? There are drug worlds. There are child and spousal abuse worlds. There are suicidal worlds. But there are also believing worlds, righteous worlds, and loving worlds.
On a late night some years ago I turned on the television. Johnny Carson was chitchatting with a “show-biz” guest. Suddenly the thought flashed through my mind, Who else, pray tell, but a “show-biz” person could Johnny interview? Who else was of any importance or interest to the viewing public? Johnny, I realized, must have only IMPORTANT people — CELEBRITIES — on the show. Show business is his world, and he could not be expected to “descend to a lower level.” An actor or entertainer is in THE ONLY world that counts! All others are beneath him. Show business people have their own journals and publications, just like other worlds. They speak their own language, have their own terminology, totally incomprehensible to an outsider. They are all knowledgeable about their own world and its personalities, though they may or may not know much or anything outside their all-important world. The same is true, of course, of all other fields — the sciences, medicine, the arts, car racers, body-builders, investors and thousands of other “worlds.” I began to think about how many different worlds exist within this world on the planet Earth. And even smaller sub worlds within those worlds. We speak of the Free World in contrast to the Communist World, the World of Islam, the Third World and many others.
I want to tell you about another world very close to you which some who read these lines may never have even visited, let alone lived in it. It is my world. It’s a beautiful world! It’s a wonderful world! It’s a vibrant world! It’s a victorious world! It’s a glorious world! IT’S THE WORLD OF THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN ON EARTH. Natural minds discern the natural. Spiritual minds discern the things of the Spirit. Natural minds cannot discern the things of the Spirit because they each belong to distinctly different realms. “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (I Cor. 2:14). For natural minds to comprehend the spiritual is equally as impossible as for a creature of the animal kingdom to comprehend things human.
By instinct, beavers build dams. But all these dams follow the same pattern. The beaver cannot think out some new, different pattern and make some new and different thing. Ants may form anthills; gophers, snakes and rodents dig holes; birds build nests. But they always follow the same pattern. There is no originality, no thinking and designing of a new idea, no new construction. The beavers’ dams, the ants’ hills, the gophers’, snakes’ and rodents’ holes, the birds’ nests are all made purely by instinct. A test was made with weaver birds. For five successive generations, weaver birds were kept in a place with no nest-building material available to them. The fifth generation had never seen a nest. But when nest-building materials were made accessible, that fifth generation immediately made nests just like weaver birds have always made nests.
Humans are of a higher order than beavers. Beavers may see men, and may observe their movements, yet there is no common ground of knowledge. Just because a beaver can build a wonderful dam of logs, branches, stones and mud in the creek, you would never give him a contract to build a hydro-electric dam of concrete and steel on a mighty river. You may take the beaver to the river and let him observe how men build dams of concrete and steel, yet the beaver has no comprehension of what it sees. It discerns only things pertaining to its own realm. It has positively no understanding of the ways of man, or of the meaning of his movements, or words, or habits. Likewise, heavenly beings are of a higher order than are mere humans. They belong to a higher realm, another world. There is no common ground of knowledge. Therefore natural men are totally incapable of comprehending that which pertains to that higher order. And so — until men are quickened by God’s Spirit, until they are born again, born from above, born of the Spirit, and made alive to the realm of the Kingdom of Heaven, and are translated into it, it is impossible for them to have any understanding, either of God, or His ways, or of His realm.
Jesus is the example par excellence of a man living and walking in the realm of the Kingdom of Heaven. He came to earth and walked among men in their realm, but at the same time He walked in the Kingdom of Heaven realm. He was a spiritual and heavenly man who walked among men. He had dominion over them. They planted their smartest lawyers and most learned theologians in the crowd and tried to trip Jesus up — He made fools of them. They tried to throw Him over a cliff and destroy Him — He just walked through their midst and went His way. Never man spake as this heavenly man spake. Never man lived as this man lived. Never man did the mighty works that He did. He lived on earth, but He came from a higher world and lived by the laws of that higher world. And He made that heavenly world available to you and me. That is what Jesus was talking about when He went about preaching the Kingdom of God and declaring, “The time is fulfilled; and the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand: repent and believe the good news!” (Mk. 1:15).
The Kingdom life we have received is given from heaven, and is heavenly. It is a life that reaches heaven. Once we obtain this life, we have fellowship with heaven and are joined to heaven. Our citizenship is in heaven. Our life-style is heavenly. Our thoughts and desires are heavenly, and we dwell in heaven. Although according to outward conditions we still live on earth, yet according to the inner life we are in heaven. We are a heavenly people, the heavenly man. The situation is just like the Lord’s during His time on earth. He said that though He “descended out of heaven,” He was still “in heaven” (Jn. 3:13). He walked in the conscious awareness of both realms, but His reality was in heaven. He was the embodiment and personification of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Mature sonship is the power and the glory of the Kingdom of Heaven in manifestation.
The following words by T. Austin-Sparks are so very pertinent to our present thought. “There were these things about Jesus, so that when you met Him on the surface, face to face, as a man, it was just impossible to feel that you had met everything, that that was all. There are some people whom you meet — and that is all. You meet them, pass the time of day or have a few words with them, and then you part, and that is all. They came and they went, and there was no more to it than that. It was never so with the Lord Jesus. If you had met Him, you would have immediately met something more than the ordinary, but you would also be left with the consciousness — That is not all; there is something very much more there than I have seen or touched. He implies a vast amount more than I have been able to recognize or grasp. That Man has a lot more behind Him than is on the face of things. He did not put all His goods in the shop window, so to speak: you were conscious of something there of a vast and profound fullness and depth, and that left a mighty impress.
“There was behind Christ another world of resources that He could draw upon, an extra world of knowledge that was available to Him, an extra world of relationships, heavenly relationships: with the Father, yes, and with other intelligences, celestial intelligences. What a big world He had behind Him to draw upon in this life down here, in its vicissitudes, its difficulties, its trials, its adversities, when He was alone and no one could help Him. Even those who would want to seek to help Him could not, for they could not minister out of that other world. He was alone here. Without the resources of this world, He had another world to draw upon, a wonderful other world of resource.
“Oh, how much more real that must be to all sons of God in our consciousness! Here I have come to the end of my resources, here I am right up in a corner, here I am, not knowing, so far as this world is concerned, which way to turn; but I have another world to draw upon, a very real world, and that other world can come right into my situation. And it is just as we are living out from heaven, out from our extra, our plus, world, that things will partake of the character of the eternal, and that into this life will come the imperishable, the incorruptible. God is always seeking to have it like that. That is why He allows the problems and the impasses, to teach the sons of God that this is not all. There is another world of resource, all so infinitely in advance of what is seen.
“Looking at the Lord Jesus, speaking as men speak, we could say that that Man was governed by different standards, by different conceptions, by different ideas, from anything in this world. He did not act just as people usually act here. His conduct was different from the usual conduct of people, from the established and accepted order of things, of how it is done, and how people think it ought to be done. No — He did not belong to that realm at all. He could not be involved in this world’s system of ideas and procedure and conduct at all. He would just not allow Himself to be roped into that order. He had another world with an altogether different set of conceptions, and He acted according to them and was governed by them, and that made Him so strange amongst us. The Lord Jesus was a foreigner to this set-up, this whole order of things. He belonged to another world, and He had that other world’s conceptions. There was a great difference about Him. They just could not keep Him in, they just could not make Him conform, they just could not understand Him at all!
“It was those very heavenly standards and conceptions and ideas that were the incorruptible things. This world’s ways of going on — what do they lead to? They lead to corruption. At their fullest, highest, greatest, they lead to corruption. Never, never was that more apparent than in our own day. The whole world is sinking into an infernal morass of corruption. But His ideas did not work out that way. You and I — we have come to know something of the Lord, something of the Lord’s standards, the Lord’s ways, the Lord’s conception of heavenly things, and we know quite well that this is not corruption, this is LIFE AND INCORRUPTION. We are rejoicing because we have come to know the Lord; but what have we come to know? Something from outside of this world altogether, something different.
“The Holy Spirit coming down from heaven has not come just to make us successful in this world, not just to prosper our carnal ventures here, not to be used by us to realize the thing in which we are interested and to further those plans of ours. He has not come down from heaven for anything like that. He has come down to reconstitute us as heavenly people and bring heaven into man’s world. That is His whole work, the reconstituting of our whole being according to heaven’s ideas. That is what He is getting at in His work in our lives, His dealings with us, His ways with us. He is after getting us to turn everything to heavenly account, to make us according to heaven’s pattern. He is after the incorruptible” — end quote.