What Is the Nature of the Controversy?

The nature of the battle?

What was the nature of the battle with Israel, centered and represented by Zion-Jerusalem?
  
It was the battle in relation to a calling and a vocation. 

They were called by God, they were chosen by God, they were an elect race [you see why we came to Romans eight], an elect race, a chosen people, in history on the earth they were the elect of God.

Chosen and called and separated, what for? Just to be saved? Just to be different? Just to be that? 

No! for a vocation, a calling, a testimony in the world, a testimony among the nations.

They were called for a mighty, heavenly vocation on the earth, to reveal God! what God is like! the reality of God! the glory of God! the holiness of God! the power of God! 

A vessel of testimony among the nations, to the nations—to the world. 

Zion, as we have been saying, is that which represents God’s full thought for mankind. 

The fulness of God’s thought is vested in, centered in, Zion, “the city of the Living God.” And because of that, the battle starts.
 
In history, Zion was the city of David, God’s anointed king. And do you notice the history of David? Up from birth... up? 

It looks like down and out... but, no, steadily, steadily up. Let all the forces of Saul and his malice, his devil-driven soul, be concentrated against this young man and what that young man suffered! 

You know the story. He seems to be a marked man, [as we say, I do not know whether you have the phrase in this country] “a speckled bird.”

He seems just right from the beginning to be a marked man. The devil had put a mark on that man and was watching him, pursuing him.

Poor David cries: “I am like a pelican of the wilderness... a sparrow upon the housetop.”

Oh yes, he is the object of a fierce and furious, relentless malice, meant for his undoing.

But he holds on his way, steadily; not because he is so strong, for there were times when David broke down: “I shall now perish,” I shall now be killed.

He resorted to some subterfuges, was a man of like-passions with us, very human; nevertheless, through it all, whether it is in the land of the Philistines by compromise (a mistake from which God sovereignly delivered him).

Or wherever it is—in the cave of Adullam, in the wilderness driven hither and thither for his very life—wherever it is, his spiritual course is on and up, spiritually.

It does not look like it outwardly, but on and up until eventually anointed, David comes to the place of the anointing, the throne; and Zion is the place of the consummation of that history of Divine election, Divine choice, Divine [dare I use the word in these days] foreordination.

He is there, on the throne. He is in the place of the full thought of God, and that is centered in him.

Zion is the place of the absolute sovereignty and Lordship of God’s anointed.

That is Zion, and we are come to Zion. We have been saying this: there is Another Greater than David that is here, and there is another Zion greater than that is here.

But it is on that point, dear friends, just focused upon that one inclusive and consummate point of the Absolute Sovereign Lordship of Jesus Christ that all the conflict rages and is centered.

~T. Austin Sparks~