A Jigsaw Puzzle
A Message to Young Christians - and Others
"In whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord" (Eph. 2:21).
"...for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; ...but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head - Christ - from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love." (Eph 4:12-13, 15-16).
"And He put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all." (Eph 1:22-23).
I suppose most of us have, at some time or another, fallen under the spell of a jigsaw puzzle. It is one of those things which get hold of you, and when you have started you do not want to give it up. It draws you on, and it is not the sort of thing you like to leave overnight to start on again in the morning. Well, here, in what we have just read, we have God's great jigsaw puzzle, and when you put these different passages together, or read them together, you have got the original. It is an exceedingly difficult thing to come to a jigsaw puzzle without having the original, the picture of what you are going to make; you do not know what it amounts to at all. But here is the original, here is the perfect, unbroken picture. God made that picture it says here "before the world was"; and it is the picture of what? Well, that is what we are going to look at. But I would suggest to you that you do read these passages together again in order to see the original, and, as we come to it now, we find it all broken up into the jigsaw. That is to say, while the picture is here, when we come to the practical side of things, we find that it is all in pieces, all in fragments, large and small fragments, all apparently uneven and jagged, crooked pieces. The whole thing has been broken up; it is all a jumble.
The Original
The original is a very wonderful picture. Right at the centre of this picture is a Man - "A fullgrown man... the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ". That is right at the very centre of God's original picture. Then it says in the other passages that we are parts of that Man. I expect, if we saw the full picture, we would have to take in lots of things that are in the background. They are all scattered through the Old Testament, they are the background. There are sheep and lambs, and oxen, and goats, and doves, and priests, and kings, and prophets, and altars, and all these things are in the picture, in the background, and they all have something to do with that Man at the centre. They all in some way relate to that Man. I will not stay now to try to show how that is so, but some of us can at once see that the lambs of the Old Testament all have something to do with this central Figure, this Man Who Himself was called "The Lamb of God". We can see how the priests all pointed to Him, stand there in this great picture in relation to Him. Well, all that is a big, vast, comprehensive picture.
The Pieces
But we have said that we are here spoken of as parts of that Man. "Till we all attain... unto... the stature of the fullness of Christ". We are all parts of the Man, and that means that in this seeming great jumble of pieces, in God's great pattern and purpose every part has its place. We know that is true in the jigsaw puzzle. It may look a strange bit, but we know that every bit has its own place. It is no use trying to fit it somewhere else. How we have tried in our puzzles sometimes to get a piece to fit in where we wanted it to; but it would not, it did not belong. We have had to spend a lot of time to find the piece that fits just that place, and we have been compelled to recognise the fact that every bit has its place. It is no use trying to put it anywhere, it belongs to a certain place; and that is what is said here. "From whom ALL THE BODY FITLY FRAMED and knit together through that which every joint supplieth" (4:16). Every bit has its place. That is true of us. It is one of the great lessons we have to learn in our relationship to the Lord Jesus, in our Christian lives, that we have our place and we will not fit in anywhere else, and we will never be happy until we are really in our place. Let us learn that lesson. That is a truth which the Word of God teaches. Each bit in the great plan of God has its place. You have your place, and I have mine.
Fitting into Place
The next thing is this, that every bit is a problem until it is in its place. Notice what it says in the second half of that sixteenth verse of Chap. 4 - "according to the working in due measure of each several part, maketh the increase of the body". Now in our puzzle we pick up a little bit, or several little bits, and we look at them, and they are a real problem to us. We cannot see what they mean, there is nothing complete on any one bit. It may just be a little bit of blue, a little fragment of red, a little touch of green, and lots of angles, corners, a real problem in itself. And we are real problems in ourselves, but the problem disappears immediately when you get the piece into its place. We have no longer a problem when that bit has found its place. I would like to say a lot to older Christians about this, but I am trying to be as simple as I can. You must look at things beyond what I am saying. What a lot of problems there are about because people are not in their place, not fitting in. They WILL NOT fit in, perhaps. They are out of their place, and they are awkward and useless, and things are not at all easy.
Let us remember that we shall be problems to ourselves and to others until our place is found where we belong. Each life has its place, and each one will be a problem until it is in its place, and that place has been accepted.
Each Piece Explanatory of the Other
Now another thing. Each several part makes an explanation for another part. That is a point not easy to grasp perhaps. Here are all these parts and each part can only be explained as you find another part that fits into it. That is to say, each part explains the other. Now, here is something with a certain mark on it. It may just be the finger of the hand, the toe of the foot. Now here is the other part which has some more of that foot or that hand, and neither of these can be explained until you get the complement, the other piece, to fit in there, so that each part explains the other.
