Search
The word recovery means that something was there originally and then was lost. So there is the need to bring that thing back to its original state. The word recovery is somewhat simple and not too profound, but when we speak of the Lord’s recovery, we need to apply it to the revelation of the whole Bible. From this point of view, the Lord’s recovery is a profound and crucial thing. In a sense, the revelation of the entire Bible is a revelation of recovery.
First, the Bible unveils to us clearly God’s intention, God’s purpose, and God’s aim. The Bible shows us that God has an intention, a purpose, with a goal as His aim. If we do not have a clear vision of what God wants, what God desires to have, what God’s intention is, we cannot know what the Lord’s recovery is. So we need to see God’s intention, God’s purpose, and God’s eternal plan.
The Bible gives a clear picture not only of God’s intention but also of God’s accomplishment according to His intention. First, God purposed, and then God came in to accomplish His purpose. Apparently, the Old Testament is simply a history of a number of great men plus a people, the nation of Israel. Actually, the history of those great individuals and the nation of Israel is just the history of God’s accomplishment.
Even the New Testament has a history. First, there is a history of a man by the name of Jesus Christ. He is a wonderful person whose history needs four books. The four Gospels are the history of Christ. Then from Acts to the end of the New Testament there is the history of the church. So the whole Bible, including the Old Testament and the New Testament, is a history book concerning God’s accomplishment, God’s move.
Third, the Bible also gives us a clear record of how God’s enemy came in to destroy what God had accomplished. The satanic way to destroy God’s accomplishment has two aspects: the inward aspect and the outward aspect. The inward aspect is to ruin God’s people, to make God’s chosen people rotten and corrupt. In the Old Testament, after God had accomplished His purpose, Satan came in to ruin the children of Israel so that they became corrupt and rotten within. Then Satan came in to destroy God’s accomplishment outwardly. The temple, which was the expression of God, was destroyed, and God’s chosen people were carried into captivity. This means that whatever God had accomplished was gone.
Fourth, God is a God with an eternal purpose. He is a purposeful God, and once He has made up His mind to do something, nothing can change His mind, and nothing can stop Him. Apparently, some things may frustrate Him a little, but nothing can stop Him. So after Satan’s destruction, God came in to redo the things that He had done before. This redoing is His recovery. This is to bring back whatever has been lost and destroyed by His enemy, Satan.
The Bible has two Testaments, the Old and the New. God is wise, and in His wisdom He foreknew that what He wanted to accomplish with His creature, man, would not be so simple. So first He had the Old Testament as a pretype, a prefigure, of the real thing. Before He came in to do the real thing in the New Testament, He took the time to make a model in the Old Testament. Today in architecture, before a building is constructed, the blueprints are drawn, and then a model of the building is built according to the blueprints. What God did in the Old Testament was just a model of what He would do in the New Testament. What God did and accomplished in the Old Testament was not the real thing. It was just a model. If you have a clear view of the Bible, you could see that the model in the Old Testament was the same as the real thing in the New Testament. The two Testaments actually reveal the same thing. One is a model, and the other is the real thing. For example, in the Old Testament you can see God’s predestination, God’s selection, God’s calling, God’s redemption, God’s justification, and God’s salvation. All the crucial things in the New Testament are present in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament there are the types of regeneration and transformation. There are also the gathering of God’s people and the building up of God’s people to be God’s dwelling place. The church is not mentioned in the Old Testament, but the model of the church is there. The temple typifies the church, and the people of Israel typify the church. Other things in the Old Testament also typify the church. The complete model of the church in the Old Testament was the temple. When the temple was fully built up, the glory of God came down. This means that God Himself came down as the glory to cover the temple and to fill the temple up. That was the picture of the full accomplishment of God’s purpose.
But then Satan came in first to ruin and corrupt the people. The temple was built up during the glorious reign of Solomon the king. But Solomon himself took the lead to become rotten and corrupt. He was corrupted by the pagan concubines. The concubines brought in the idols, and this ruined the people. The entire nation of Israel was ruined, so God had no way to dwell among them. He had to give them up. Then the Babylonian army came to destroy the temple and the holy city and to capture the people away to Babylon. The first forefather of the children of Israel was Abraham, who was called out of Babel, which later became Babylon. Satan came in to bring all Abraham’s descendants back to the very place that Abraham was called out of. So whatever God accomplished was gone.
But after seventy years God came in to do a recovery work. God came in to recover the thing that was lost. In the recovery of God’s expression the scale was not so big as the original, but the quality was higher. Humanly speaking, we pay attention to the size of something, but God cares not about the size but about the quality. By reading Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, and Zechariah you can see that the returned people were deeply dealt with by God. Their spiritual morality and character were higher than those of the children of Israel before the temple was built. In a sense, Solomon was not that moral; he had many concubines. That is terrible! That is a kind of unveiling of the rottenness of that king of wisdom. He was wise, but he was rotten. His morality was too low! But after the captivity, in the recovery, the character of God’s people was very much uplifted. If you consider Ezra and Nehemiah, you have to admit that these leaders were pure and moral. Their character had a high standard. So as to quality, the Lord’s recovery was higher than what had been there previously.
The Old Testament begins with the first Adam, and the New Testament begins with the last Adam. The first Adam was Adam himself, and the last Adam is Christ. The model in the Bible begins with the old man, but the real thing in the New Testament begins with the new man. To say that Christ is the last Adam means that He ends the adamic race. He was the last one of Adam’s race. The old man was ended in Christ. He is also the second man. The second man means a new beginning. So the model was with the first Adam as a beginning, and the real thing was with the last Adam, the second man, as a beginning. When you open up the New Testament, you have Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. You have a new beginning. Just as the first Adam began to produce to replenish the earth, so the last Adam, Christ, began to produce many members, His believers, to replenish the entire earth. With this producing Christ, God accomplished His purpose. Beginning with Pentecost, God’s temple, the church, began to be built. This time it was the real thing and not the model.
But within a short time, as he had done in the Old Testament, Satan came in among the believers to do a ruining work. He ruined the Christians and lowered their Christian character. They became exactly as the children of Israel had become in the Old Testament. They became idolatrous, leaving Christ for other things. Then Satan came in and destroyed the church and carried away the believers into Babylon. This is why you have Babylon not only in the Old Testament but also in the New Testament. In Revelation 17 there is Babylon the Great, which includes Catholicism and all the Protestant denominations as the daughters. The Old Testament Babylon was just a model, and the New Testament Babylon the Great is the real thing. Of course this kind of word is offensive to Christendom. However, it is not we but the Bible that speaks of a great harlot and many daughters. There is surely such a word in the New Testament. So there must be the real persons. Who is that great harlot today, and who are the daughters of this great harlot? If this is not the Roman Catholic Church and all the denominations, to whom can this word be applied? Look at the situation. Is there not a great harlot committing fornication all the time? Fornication in the Bible is that God’s people go away from God to something other than God, just as a wife might go away from her husband to someone else. The Bible tells us that the unique Husband in this universe is God Himself. His people are His wife (Isa. 54:5; Jer. 31:32). Christ came as the Bridegroom to have the bride (John 3:29).
In 2 Corinthians 11 Paul says that he betrothed the believers as a pure virgin to Christ. At the end of the Bible, in Revelation 19 there is a wedding of God and His people. The real fornication is that God’s people would give Him up and go to something else. Catholicism has gone away from God to something else. In the same principle, all the Protestant churches also have gone away from Christ the Lord to things other than Him. So in the eyes of God, Catholicism is the great harlot, and all the Protestant denominations and divisions are daughters of that great harlot.
Because of this situation there is the need of recovery. In the ancient times God’s faithful people were called out of Babylon and back to Jerusalem. That was the Old Testament recovery. Today there is also the need to come out of Babylon the Great and to come back to the proper church life.
When God’s people were captured in the Old Testament, all the holy things were lost. In the Old Testament model, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, destroyed the temple with his army, carried away the children of Israel, and also carried away all the utensils of the temple. In the recovery all the utensils were brought back from Babylon to Jerusalem (Ezra 1:7-11). All the utensils in the temple are types of the different aspects of Christ. So in the New Testament when Satan captured the New Testament saints into Babylon the Great, he also captured all the holy things, the different aspects of Christ. In Catholicism hardly anyone knows the truth concerning Christ as our righteousness, Christ as our holiness, Christ as our life, and Christ as our life supply. All these things have been lost. Now the Lord wants to recover all these things. He not only wants to call His faithful people out of Babylon and back to the proper church life but also to recover and bring back all the different aspects of Christ that have been lost. All the messages that we have given have been to bring back all the lost aspects of Christ.
The Lord’s recovery is really among us, and, although the scale is quite small, the standard of character is higher than Christianity. In the Lord’s recovery the high standard of character must be kept and maintained. Some have checked with me, asking, “Do you mean that all the other Christians are rotten and that only the local church people are not rotten?” I do not mean that. If any people have become rotten, they are no more in the reality of the Lord’s recovery. Whatever and whoever is rotten is not in the recovery. The local churches are people who have been recovered out of their rottenness back to the pure church life. The local church is not a kind of organization or religious group. The local church is the pure church life as a pure testimony of Jesus. If we become rotten, we are no longer in the reality of the Lord’s recovery.
This is why in the New Testament the apostle Paul would not tolerate any kind of immorality. In 1 Corinthians 5 Paul charged the church not to associate with that immoral person. The church as a pure testimony of Christ would not tolerate any impurity, any immorality. The church has to be pure. Once the church becomes rotten, it loses its nature and standing as the Lord’s testimony. When we speak of the local churches, we mean the genuine lovers of Christ, the pure seekers of Christ. These throughout all the centuries are the local church people. We have to get out of Babylon and get away from all the rottenness and corruption.
Some have asked, “Do you say that there are no genuine Christians in the Catholic Church or in the Protestant denominations?” My answer is that many real Christians are there. But you have to look again at the type in the Old Testament. There were many, many genuine Hebrews left in Babylon. Even Daniel was there. Daniel had no chance to go back, but do not forget that he opened his window three times a day to pray toward Jerusalem (Dan. 6:10). He was not able to leave Babylon, but he was altogether for the recovery. I do believe that the recovery was brought in by his prayer. He prayed a lot in Babylon for God’s people to get out of Babylon.
The two terms reformation or restoration are not so adequate. The proper word should be recovery. According to the human mind, Martin Luther brought the Reformation in. But actually in God’s eyes he was used by God to recover only a part, or one aspect, of Christ. He was used by God to recover the aspect of justification by faith. Actually, that was the recovery of Christ as our righteousness. That “utensil” had gotten lost. That utensil in the holy temple had been carried away by Catholicism into Babylon. Then God used Martin Luther to bring that utensil back. Justification by faith is actually Christ as our righteousness. That aspect was one of the leading utensils in God’s temple. But it was carried away by Catholicism and lost. Then God came in to use Martin Luther to bring this utensil back.
Actually, the recovery began when Paul was on this earth. When he wrote 2 Timothy, he wrote in a sense of recovery. At that time the church had been ruined already. So Paul wrote 2 Timothy to recover and inoculate the corrupted church life with the truth. That was a recovery.
The apostle John, who wrote his books about twenty-five years later than Paul, also wrote to recover. The Gospel of John was written to recover, his Epistles were written to recover, and Revelation was written to recover. By reading the seven epistles in Revelation, you can see that they are recovery epistles. Some of the churches had become corrupted and lost their testimony, so the seven epistles were written to recover them. From the end of the first century, the recovery began, and it has not stopped to this day. By reading church history you can see that the recovery has been going on in every century. From the end of the first century until today there is a line of the Lord’s recovery. This recovery has been increasing all the time. The Lord’s recovery has never been in such an intensified scale as it is today. Although the Lord’s recovery existed even before Martin Luther, it was not noticed by the worldly people, because it was hidden.
History tells us that the Catholic Church killed more Christians than the Roman Empire did. This means that the Lord was doing a recovery work there, and the Catholic Church was killing people who would take care of the recovery. Through all those centuries under the Roman Empire and under the Roman Church, the recovery was going on strongly and forcefully. The Roman Church utilized the secular rulers to kill the recovery people. The Church of England burned some faithful ones. Madame Guyon was in the recovery, and she was put into prison by the Catholic Church. John Bunyan, the writer of Pilgrim’s Progress, was persecuted by the Church of England. These are examples of the recovery people.
The Lord’s recovery of the church life began to be apparent with Zinzendorf two and a half centuries ago. He practiced the church life as part of the recovery in Bohemia. Then later in Britain the Brethren received even more light concerning the church, and they practiced the church life in a fuller way than Zinzendorf had. Now today we also are practicing the church life. Zinzendorf practiced the church life in the 1700s, the Brethren practiced the church life in the 1800s, and today we are practicing the church life in the 1900s. We consider this as three steps: Zinzendorf’s practice, the practice of the Brethren, and now the practice among us. Of course, the recovery is getting fuller and richer as it progresses.
