“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5).
The history of God’s people in both the new and old covenant periods is that we don’t want to trust God. We see the model of distrust in the story of the manna that God gave to Israel in the wilderness; it had to be gathered every morning and a double supply was given on the Sabbath eve so that the people would not have to gather on the Sabbath and so break the Law.
But people still tried to store it up because they didn’t want to have to trust God every day for their life giving needs. The manna of course is a figure, a figure for the Word of God, the Bread of Heaven, which is Christ. The fulfillment of the manna figure in the new covenant is found in the provision of God’s revelation, which comes to us by a proceeding word, the rhema, what Peter described as “the rhema of eternal life” (John 6:68). This is the word that Jesus said we are to live upon – “every rhema proceeding from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). The rhema, being a specific word, is not the logos, which is the whole counsel of God’s word, although it derives from it and is not inconsistent with it.
Christians, like Israel, don’t want to trust God to bring the rhema of eternal life to them; because if a person is to receive a rhema, that word proceeding from the mouth of God, it presupposes an intimacy with God that most Christians shrink away from. God’s light shines too brightly and searches out the heart too deeply and the conscience cringes and the fleshly nature seeks a place to hide from His penetrating gaze.
That hiding place is religion. We invent a religion and we build our religion around an extract of the logos; such as transubstantiation, priestcraft, baptism by immersion, speaking in tongues, unique aspects of external dress and appearance, etc. so that our bit of the logos separates our religion from that of others.
Now the logos is not the proceeding word, but the finished word. Jesus was the logos that became flesh and in Him all the counsel of God’s purposes was fulfilled. But the logos, the fulfilled and completed word, requires the anointing of God’s Spirit before it can become the rhema – a living word; without that anointing the logos becomes whatever man wants to make of it and this is where religion comes from; the Word without the Spirit.
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