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"God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost, and with power" (Acts 10: 38).
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He hath anointed Me to preach the
gospel" (Luke 4: 18).
"For God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto Him" (John 3: 34).
"Thy Throne . . . . . Thy Sceptre . . . . . Thy God hath anointed Thee with the oil of
gladness above Thy fellows" (Heb. 1: 8, 9).
He is God's Anointed, His Prophet, Priest, and King. We confess that He is
the Christ, and we acknowledge this threefold fullness. All true sanctification flows from
Him.
There is a phase of the anointing that belongs to the period of miraculous gifts
(II Cor. 1: 21, 22) which is omitted in the dispensation of the mystery (Eph. 1: 13), but the
true anointing remains. It is seen in "the unity of the Spirit", which brings us into such
vital union with Christ that His anointing becomes ours. We are partakers of His
holiness. He is made unto us sanctification as well as redemption (I Cor. 1: 30).
While the mystery was never a subject of Old Testament revelation, a very beautiful
figure of sanctified unity is given in Psa. 133: that it would benefit us to ponder:--
"Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity. It is
like the precious ointment upon the head, that ran down upon the beard, even Aaron's
beard: that went down to the skirts of his garments: As the dew of Hermon, and as the
dew that descended upon the mountain of Zion."
Here we have a double figure of unity. The ointment that was poured upon the head
of Aaron extended to the very skirts of his garments. The A.V. of the second figure
needs a correction. There is no real "dew" in Palestine, but a "summer sea night mist"
rolls in and drenches the parched earth. The mist makes no distinctions. It unites in one
Mt. Hermon away in the North and Mt. Zion in the South. So are all in Christ.
The apostle says, "We are unto God a sweet savour of Christ" (II Cor. 2: 16). Just as
we found that "consecration" was "filling the hand" with Christ in service and offering,
so true sanctification, true unction, true anointing is a life that is so much of Christ, that
every act, every word, every thought is just the manifestation of the Anointed One.
Words easy to write, words that condemn us as we think of ourselves, words that compel
us to flee to Him, to be buried in His death that we may rise to walk in newness of life
and serve in newness of spirit.
This holy anointing of ours in Christ comes not "on the flesh"; it resolutely sets aside
all counterfeit; it is found where "Christ is all" or not at all, and it is not enjoyed by the
alien, the stranger, the foreigner from grace. As we can more fully say, "For me to live is
Christ", as we more fully "preach Christ", as the life of Christ is more really the life we
now live in the flesh, as the fruit of the Spirit is more evidently manifest, so shall we
approximate more to the fulfillment of this sacred type of the holy anointing oil.
John, writing to believers of another calling, expressed the same truth, saying:--