The Necessity for Weakness # 1

The Necessity for Weakness # 1

Read: 2 Chron. 26:15; 1 Cor. 1:27; 2 Cor. 12:9; Eph. 6:10; 3:16; Col. 1:11

The great importance and value of weakness and conscious dependence is what lies upon the face of those passages when you bring them together. It almost looks like a contradiction: "God chose the weak things..." - "Be strong...", "strengthened with might".

It is always possible to place Scripture over against Scripture and to make it represent a contradiction, but Scripture never really does contradict itself. That must be settled once and for all. The meaning of apparent contradiction has to be looked for deeper down, and when the real meaning is found, apparently contradictory Scriptures are found to be perfectly in agreement. Here is one of quite a number of those apparent paradoxes. If I were to put it in a certain form the paradox would appear all the more acute. If I were to say weakness is right and strength is right, and they are both to exist together at the same time, you would see how acute the seeming paradox becomes. Weakness and strength nevertheless are both clearly represented as according to God's mind, and are to be in the same individual at exactly the same time. Weak, so weak that you can do nothing! Mighty, strengthened with might so that marvellous things are accomplished. A simultaneous consciousness, a simultaneous experience, a simultaneous reality, and there is no contradiction in it. You say, "How can these things be? That is simply confusing!" It needs to be made clear.

We have said at times something about weakness, the necessity for weakness, the importance of a kind of weakness, dependence, consciousness of helplessness, and we have immediately had thrown at us all those Scriptures about being strong, with the intent to undo our argument, as though the two things could not go together in harmony. People have a strange way of getting mentally tied up with Scripture in those seeming contradictions, and it therefore becomes necessary and helpful if we can understand the meaning of such seemingly contradictory states as demanded by the Lord to coexist at one time in the same object.

The necessity for weakness is perfectly plain. Right through the whole of the Scriptures, Old Testament and New, it is made perfectly clear that God begins by undoing men and bringing them down to a place of weakness and emptiness, that He really does empty His vessels before He fills them. The Lord really does break before He makes. The Lord does take away strength before He makes His strength perfect in the same object. There is no doubt about that whatever in reading the Word of God and studying the history of any instrumentality which has served the Lord's purpose in any vital way, and the necessity for weakness and conscious dependence is so real as to come into the realm of Divine value and to seem to be a tremendous value and importance to us and to the Lord.

Where then does this necessity begin? From whence does it take its rise? It takes its rise from the desire of nature for power and strength. Universally man by nature desires strength, shall we shay dislikes (that is a weak word) weakness, revolts against weakness, desires power. That desire is in us by nature. It would be difficult to find the person, however insignificant they might seem to be among men and women, who really naturally delighted in being at a discount, took pleasure in being set at naught, unable to stand up to others, to hold their own, to possess a measure of dignity. No, that is not human nature and very often even a feigned humility is only a subtle way of trying to draw attention to oneself, and thereby to gain an advantage. We have heard people say boastingly that they were most humble people in the world, and that was simply self coming out in a form of pride under the guise of feigned humility. We should never be able to track down every form of self-life which in some way or another expresses itself in the direction of wanting to be strong, aiming at a kind of power, influence, standing, holding one's own, and so on. That is human nature.

The point is this, that in human nature as it is now, what we  call "fallen humanity", the whole matter of power has been subverted so that it has become a personal thing, and thereby it has become an evil thing. God never meant man to be an undignified groveling worm in the earth. He meant him to be noble, magnificent, the highest product of His hand, endued with a great dignity, possessed of wonderful power and strength and influence. But God intended all that for His satisfaction, His glory, His honor, for Himself. The whole thing has become subverted, and it has become a nature of personal interests in some form or another, and that is human nature. It is only when the entire self principle is broken that we can accept gladly a position of being nothing for the Lord's sake.

Herein lies the secret of the necessity for weakness: that man as he is has in him a subverted strength or quest for strength. Back of that thee lies that supreme satanic objective. The one dominating objective of satan is power, strength, and dominion, and he put that idea, that suggestion, into man to be as God, that is, to have power in himself apart from God for himself. Man and satan thereby came into the awful fraternity of power seekers for personal ends, and whether we have that in our minds as an objective or not, our natures have that as an objective in spite of ourselves. Even saints discover that in their natures there is that tendency, and that when God blesses, and marvelously blesses, there is that evil enemy within the old nature which would take hold of the very blessing of God and use it for self-glory; "he was marvelously helped, till he was strong (2 Chron. 26:15). Uzziah took hold of the marvelous blessings of God as a means of power, bringing him into prominence and carrying him 4even into realms forbidden. That evil enemy within, which even in saints marvelously helped and blessed of God, from time to time rises us and becomes their undoing. It is the old thing over again. satan's supreme object, brought into the very constitution of fallen man and manifesting itself ever and always in that realm toward personal power, strength for ourselves in self-interest.

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 2)