Matt 1: 21
We search the records of Thy past eternity, No tongue His name declares. Beings angelic, great in power and might Not one Thy counsel shares.
No whispering zephyr bore the precious name along,
(Though joy their chants disclose9);
When first, in all its beauty from Thine hand,
For Him 10 this earth arose.
Hid in Thy heart’s affections lay that peerless name From everlasting days.
None were co-heirs to value it with Thee,
And sound its ceaseless praise.
And earth so fair, grew old, while ages roll’d away
With ceaseless, silent tread;
“Fulness of times”11 drew on, up-bearing those
To whom th’unfolding sped.
“Call his name Jesus”, swift to earth from heaven they bear12
His wondrous glorious NAME;
Faith owns it, and grace reckons him co-heir,
For whom the Saviour came.
Filling with the joy the vast eternity to come,
Each echoing voice still bears;
“Name above every name”13 —well known to Thee,
Known now to chosen heirs14.
From A Voice to the Faithful—vol 19, 1885
11 Gal 4: 4
12 Matt 1: 21; Luke 2: 21
13 Phil 2: 10; Eph 3: 21
14 Rom 8: 17
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“PROVING WHAT IS ACCEPTABLE UNTO
THE LORD”
This is a short exhortation containing nothing attractive for the intellect, but very much for the heart. Are we doing it? How much of the “proving” has there been in your course and in mine this day? How much of real, earnest, godly exercise as to what was the Lord’s mind about each little occurrence?
“Ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know
all things”, 1 John 2: 20. This is true of every Christian, whether only a babe, or more advanced as a young man, or a father in Christ. And this gives to us the power to do what the verse I have quoted exhorts us to do.
Is there then anything in your daily path with which Christ can have fellowship? (You will be instructed as to this in the word.) Are this and that “acceptable unto the Lord”? If so then persevere in it, go on with it. Let no human influence deter you from this path. Why? Because the Lord is with you, and can there be anything like that?
You have His own blessed presence, and favour, and sympathy, and they will compensate, even if you have to face all the world’s frowns.
But again, Is there anything in your daily path or allowed in yourself, that is not “acceptable unto the Lord”?
If so (suffer one to exhort you and himself too) judge it, have done with it, refuse it, and do all this at once; and why? You are risking the loss of the Lord’s present favour and company with you. To lose the sense of these is to lose all that is worth living for in this world. To have to tread this world alone! What a cheerless blank the Christian life would be. And I do tread it alone if Christ is not practically with me, and this when I may be looked upon by others as a pious person.
Is it an established truth for our hearts that the Lord has not only dealt with and settled the question of our sins, 145
but that now the desire of His heart is to be with us— daily —
continually near; the One I can consult in every difficulty, and on whose love I can rest all the day long? What is my Christianity worth, if it does not minister these to my soul?
To have Christ (as He was at Bethany) at home with me on earth, is only surpassed by one thing, namely, the blessed future, when I shall be at home with Him in heaven, John 14: 3.
From A Voice to the Faithful—vol 19, 1885
146
“Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days”
If I am walking with God, I shall know something of
this blessed life of a Christian in this world. In John 21 how different we find it. The disciples there are seeking their food from the waters, not communicating of their own abundance. This is just the opposite to this exhortation in Eccles 11. In the one case I am seeking something from this scene for myself, in the other I am seeking to communicate to others from my own abundance. The difference is immense. Man is so constituted that he is always of necessity a giver or a receiver. And if I launch out upon the troubled waters of this life, seeking to get something from them, I must learn, as all of us will have to sooner or later, that John 21: 5 has a lesson in it for me. (I am only speaking of Christians.) I shall find that when the Lord asks me, after the dark night of my toil, “Have you any meat?”
that I have only one answer to give Him, as they had. And
“they answered him, No”, John 21: 15.
This world—the moral scene through which I am passing—does not contain CHRIST. It had no room for Him when He trod it in grace, and it has no room for Him today.
Hence, if I am a Christian, it cannot satisfy me; for it cannot minister Him to me, and nothing can feed the soul that has once tasted of life but the “bread of life”, John 6. Bread is often referred to in Leviticus as the staff of the natural life (Lev 26: 26; Ps 105); and in like manner Jesus only is the manna that came down from heaven—the spiritual food—
the “bread” for His people today, the Giver of life too to those that have it not. What then has satisfied you, that which you daily find to be enough, learn to distribute to meet the needs of those around you. Christianity is never selfish—it always thinks of others. Whatever the need or the sorrow may be, there is relief. Jesus is the “bread of life”, John 6: 147
33, 48. “Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days”.
It is only the ministry of Christ that will meet and alleviate the sorrows all around you. This will minister to all earthly sorrows, and will lead on the soul to what is eternal and lasting—“Having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come”, 1 Tim 4: 8. “Give a portion to seven” ( the complete number), “and also to eight” (that is, God’s grace goes beyond all evil, and thus is without limit),
“for thou knowest not what evil shall be upon the earth”, Eccles 11: 2. “They need not depart; give ye them to eat”, Matt 14: 16. But before you give it, it must be “thy bread”; that is, it must be what you live upon yourself, of which you minister. Nothing else is really yours. If Christ is not your daily portion—the satisfying One for you—how can you speak of Him or minister Him to others? Your words will seem to them but as “idle tales”, for the Spirit will not add the unction of His power to words that are not true and real as to yourself.
But the privilege and responsibility remain.
Christians are directly addressed in the words at the head of this paper; nor do I admit that they have no application to us. If powerless to minister Christ, what then am I living upon day by day, since it is “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh”, Matt 12: 34? The Lord Jesus died to give me all I needed, to satisfy me as a poor sinner, and to fill me as a saint. “Children, have ye any meat?” Am I filled, satisfied, fed day by day? If so, “out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water”, John 7: 38. So that I may communicate to others. “Freely ye have received, freely give”. Is my Christianity then marked by this exercise of it?
“Upon the waters”—restful or restless—“bread” is to be cast, reminding one of Rev 17: 15, “The waters which thou sawest
... are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues”.
Such then is to be your life and mine; and if we enter into what Christ is, it will be so spontaneously, daily, a life of casting our “bread upon the waters”, only doing this in perfect rest and contentment of soul. This marked His life 148
on earth. The people—everybody, the place—everywhere; for we are told, “In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand” (that is, go on, continue):
“for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that”, Eccles 11: 6. May we live day by day in perfect rest of heart; experience what it is to have Christ with us, the only changeless, great, and satisfying reality in this changing scene, brightening and gladdening the house or the business, and therefore ministered in all our footsteps,
“until he come”.
From The Christian’s Friend—vol 13, 1886
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In the garden of Eden were planted two trees—“the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil”, Gen 2: 9. Looked at separately, they bring before us those two of whom we read in 1 Cor 15: 47—“The first man [Adam] is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven”.
From the position in paradise of the tree of life (for it distinctly states that it grew “in the midst of the garden”) we learn that CHRIST has always been God’s centre, although the six days of creation, with Adam as its head, were first developed. But along with the tree of life (and in the same place) is found the “tree of knowledge of good and evil”; for Eve says, speaking of this tree, that its place too is “in the midst of the garden”, Gen 3: 3. As to the “tree of life”, it is clear that it could only refer to Christ (Rev 2: 7); and in the fact that both are “in the midst of the garden” we see that both are united in Him. Our responsibility, as of Adam, has been taken up, and met in Him and by Him. He is thus God’s centre, and life is His by acquired right. Around Him, as the tree of life in the eternal state, God will group, as He did in type in Eden, “every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food”, Gen 2: 9. While for Adam (Christ) himself there will be found one (Eve) of himself too (type of the church) to enter into, and to share with him in all that he has, as thus set in enjoyment over all things. For it was in the garden, before man fell, that Eve was brought to Adam. The creation in Genesis is God’s picture, in type and shadow, of the purpose of His heart concerning CHRIST—a purpose hidden, in the past ages, but existing there from all eternity, long before the foundation of the world, and now made known to faith, Eph 1: 9, 10; 3: 9-11. God will presently act in power to bring out into full display His own original thought; and it is to this He refers when, in the view of all that sin, sorrow, and death have done in the first creation, we read, “And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new”, Rev 21: 5. And “for eternity”
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attaches to all, since all is based, not on the first man, but on the second.
It does not appear that the “tree of life” was forbidden to man before he fell. He was set up in paradise in life, and with this word, “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”, Gen 2: 16, 17. God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”. The man lived. As long as he ate of every tree of the garden, save the one forbidden, he continued to live; ie, in partaking of the tree of life, as well as of the other trees. He continued in that state in which God had at first created him. This does not seem to me to shut out his then eating of the “‘tree of life”. He was responsible to live (and the means to live were around him) in that state in which God had created him; that is, he was to know nothing more, neither good nor evil. It was innocence; for he was not to know anything in addition to that life in which he stood with God. But this was responsibility, and on this ground all was lost. Sin entered, and the law proved it, and only showed how complete the ruin was. Death was upon all.
For the first time then after the fall it appears the
“tree of life” was forbidden to man; a most gracious provision on the part of God. Man had acquired the knowledge of good (and God was its source), without power to act upon it or to please Him, Rom 7: 18. He had also acquired the knowledge of evil, and along with that a nature always prone to follow it. Now God speaks, and He says,
“The man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”, Gen 3: 22. To eat, and by thus eating to live for ever as long as he ate, in that state of innocence in which God had first created him, would have been right and simple obedience; but to eat, and live for ever in the garden, with the knowledge of good and evil (good to which he could never attain, and evil to which he was always prone), in misery therefore, God could not have; 151
“so he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life”, Gen 3: 24. This was grace, not judgment; the judgment was pronounced before, both on Adam and his wife, and on the serpent too. Life then is distinctly refused to a responsible but a fallen race in that condition.
But Jesus, standing in perfect grace in the place of the responsible man at the cross, glorifies God. Tried and tested in every way all through His life, which ended in the cross, all that man should have been for God HE WAS. It is true that all was over for the first man, for all the race of Adam, and that life is refused to every one on that ground.
The “flaming sword” is the sword of judgment to any advancing to take of life. But now, with all my responsibilities met, with the first man ended in God’s sight (even in the bringing in of a second Man, “the Lord from heaven”, who has glorified God), He only—the second Man—
now stands before God; and He who in Himself has met all the claims of justice for the responsible man, and who has also as man perfectly met the heart of God, has it as His right to take of the “tree of life” in the midst of the garden.
Can the partaking of the “tree of life” (His by this acquired right to it) be withheld from Him who has thus, as Man, perfectly gauged and answered while under it, all the responsibility of the first man? No; and at the solemn moment of yielding up His life on earth, in Psalm 16, He thus speaks: “Thou wilt show me the path of life”; and again,
“I lay down my life, that I might take it again”, John 10: 17.
Thus we see in this God’s one central thought—to establish everything in heaven and earth upon CHRIST. God will have Him as the centre of all His ways of grace to man throughout eternity. All therein is for His enjoyment, and He in perfect grace hands these things to us, associating us with Himself; for Eve was co-sharer with Adam in it all.
Moreover, the duration of the life is, in Christianity, first unfolded as “eternal” (Titus 1: 2); for it is the life of Christ Himself as the risen One out of death. Life, if it could 152
have been continuously sustained in Eden by their eating of every tree in the garden (save the one forbidden), would have been endless, and therefore “eternal” in that sense.
But it would have depended on man’s continuous obedience; it would have been a dependent life. Now we have the obedience (His) absolutely perfect at the beginning, tested as He was in every possible way, and life as the result, Rom 5: 19. So it will be seen that it must necessarily be
“eternal”; for the value of the work done always abides before God.
In Psalm 21: 2-4 also Jesus is before us as the One
who has acquired, as Man, the right to life: “Thou hast given him his heart’s desire, and hast not withholden the request of his lips ... He asked life of thee, and thou gavest it him, even length of days for ever and ever”. To this the apostle refers also in Heb 5: 7. But being heard (as in Ps 22) “from the horns of the unicorns”, He associates us in all that blessing into which He then enters as Man. “I will declare thy name unto my brethren; in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee”—fulfilled in John 20: 17. In that song grace has given us the privilege to join; nor can we fail to do so if we see the perfect way in which all has been done, and the perfect place of rest, before God, into which HE has entered now, along with those for whom He has secured it.
It is a relief to the heart to expand, and thus to turn away from its little self, and to see God working for the glory of His beloved Son, to whom we are necessary, as a part of that glory into which God will bring Him, Eph 3: 21. To see thus everything established on an immutable basis, the first man no longer before God, but the second, to whom the name “The eternal life” now attaches in a twofold way; to know that, through grace, we are eternally united to Him, since (as the apostle says) “This is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son”. “He that hath the Son, hath life”, 1 John 5: 11, 12. To look back along the dim vista of the ages, and to see this His purpose shining brightly in the ‘garden of delight’, which sin spoilt, and to look forward to what it will yet be, when all shall be 153
in divine order around Him who is, to all eternity, to be the centre in the midst of the “paradise of God”, Rev 2: 7.
From The Christian’s Friend—vol 13, 1886
TREASURE IN AN EARTHEN VESSEL
Thy grace transforms the shapeless clay15
To vessel16 for Thy hand;
Then fills17, till living waters flow18
To cheer Thy pilgrim band.
Oh, grace! beyond expression great
To choose, and form, and fill
Thyself the Fountain, Lord, to be,
Unchanged by earthly ill.
In PEACE, surpassing human ken,
Thy peace, O Lord, I stand19
And wait, contented just to be
This “vessel” for Thy hand.
From The Christian’s Friend—vol 13, 1886
15 Jer 18: 2-6; Rom 12: 2
16 2 Tim 2: 21
17 John 4: 14
18 John 7: 38
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GOD’S OBJECT IN BRINGING US INTO THEM
(James 1)
We try various things with the object of displaying either their badness or their goodness, and thus God works oftentimes with men. When God allows special trials to overtake natural men, it is to lead them to turn to Him in them, to teach them that “the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will” (Dan 4: 17), and that He is able to abase him who walks in pride.
But trials of similar character to those found among the ‘children of this world’ are found also among God’s children. Oftentimes God’s desire in thus dealing with them is to manifest to themselves the evil of their own natural hearts (but this is not always necessary); and what is always necessary and of far greater importance in God’s sight is to make then, faith shine more brightly. This was the desired end in His dealings with His servant Job, though in the same trials Job also learnt deep lessons as to nature’s (ie, his own) vileness, Job 42: 5, 6. God sees faith in His children: this He values, and the trial is a trial of faith. Thus God takes the distinct ground in our trials of helping us.
This is in order that faith (which, it may be, He sees is so feeble) may be strengthened. I believe there is no exception, but that every trial of a Christian is a trial of faith, 1 Pet 1: 7.
It is evidently not always the desire of God to manifest to me (or to any one else) the evil that is in my nature—evil which always rebels against the trials He sends. For if I bow to the trials, and to the word of God, which tells me God is taking the ground of helping me in and by them, nature gets no place and no voice; that is, it is not displayed, though there.
These trials are called “chastenings” in Heb 12: 5-8, and “purging” in John 15. In both we see that God is helping us—dealing with us as with sons. Chastening is 155
either to prevent or to remedy our running into evil. First, it is by the word of God, which runs always counter to my will; and second, where this fails it is by trials of various kinds, for God seeks to keep me in a right path, and to prevent me from going wrong. Both of these are chastening, but neither is because of any wrong doing. Then chastening and trial are for something wrong done. Then they are remedial, not preventive. I believe God always chastens to prevent before He chastens to remedy. But to be without that, “of which all are partakers” (Heb 12: 8), would mark me as not of the family. If trials and chastenings to prevent my going wrong, as well as trials and chastenings to restore me when I have gone wrong, should both fail to effect this object, God may repeat them, or act in judgment, 1 Cor 11: 30-32; 1 John 5: 16. We have then to “count it all joy”, according to this chap 1, “when we fall into divers temptations”. God sees in me something that He desires to help. Hence the trial, and hence also my joy. The trials are occasions of manifesting my faith, opportunities given to me to prove God in a way that I have not done previously. What is the meaning of verse 13? “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man: but every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed”. I believe God’s desire is by the trial to manifest the good that is in us; that is, to bring out that faith which He has given, Eph 2: 8. If the trial manifests only the evil that is in me (rebellion, or plans of my own to get out of the trial), I am drawn away by my own evil lusts. But this was not God’s first object in sending the trial. He may see it necessary to show me out to myself; but even with the ungodly their trials are allowed, in order to turn them to God, see Job 33: 19-29; see also Ps 107. Trials test faith, or they stir up the evil (rebellion, &c) that dwells in my nature. The one casts me on God, the other carries me farther and farther away from Him, as to the experience of my soul. I believe that it means that God never tries a man merely to expose the evil that is in him to the man himself, as if this were the end, the prime motive of the trial, though 156
this may come out (as with Job), in order that we may see what we are. God has a higher object than this, even our blessing. In this way I understand Genesis 22: 1.
From The Christian’s Friend—vol 13, 1886
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THE POWER FOR FRUIT-BEARING
(John 15)
Two things are seen in the Lord: “life” and “fruit”. They were ever in Him where (here on earth) death and sterility, through sin, lay over everything. But in all the work of laying the foundation, in all the work of atonement, which was the bringing in of life, the Lord Jesus was alone; but that being done, He connects us with Himself in the bringing forth of fruit to God. This shows the perfection of His work.
Israel, in Psalm 80 was the vine brought out of Egypt, and planted to bear fruit for God. Here we see redemption was the necessary preliminary for fruit, as it is now. If one is not a Christian there can be no fruit. As to Israel, we know what was the end, for it is told us by Himself, who, walking on earth, sought, during those three years, the fruit—but found none. “Nothing but leaves” (Matt 21: 19), for the husbandmen said among themselves, “this is the heir; come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance”(v 38), and this they did.
But though Israel was a fruitless vine, Jesus on earth was bringing to God all the desired precious fruits, and from Him, as Man, every one was good in its season! “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well-pleased” (Matt 17: 5), testified of this. Moreover, His own words declared it also: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman”, John 15: 1. No longer Israel was the fruit-bearer, He takes this place Himself.
It was all over as to fruit from Israel nationally, and the Gentiles never had been the vine; but in grace He connects all the disciples with Himself (not with Israel) as fruitful branches.
The only proof of life in John 15 is this fruit, it is the only proof of a living connection with Him. A man may make a profession of being Christ’s and of being livingly united to Him. The test of this profession would be fruit, v 5. Every child of God bears fruit now to God: it is his proper normal condition. It is not here the quantity of fruit that is in question, but whether there is any fruit at all as the proof of discipleship, v 8. The Father, who is the Husbandman, takes 158
away (as Judas) “every branch … that beareth not fruit”. The husbandman only nourishes and cherishes the fruit-bearing branches, and as the Father cared for Him on earth, so now He cares for them. Wonderful thought for us!
The only power for fruit is abiding in Christ. Two things, always ever in perfection in Him, will therefore mark a Christian, as abiding in Christ: first, dependence (see Psalm 16 and the record of the Lord’s life, as contained in the gospels, to trace Him thus as a man on earth); second, obedience; see Phil 2 and Ps 22 for this. Dependence turns to God in everything; and obedience follows His mind and will, as expressed by His word, and this at whatever cost. Such is what abiding in Him means.
“Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well; whose branches run over the wall”, Gen 49: 22. This is what Christ ever was and is to God, and it is what Christians are as Christ’s, and as abiding in Him, God sees Christ in them (see 2 Cor 2: 15), and in that way fruit is not occasional but continuous. May the Spirit exercise us aright as to this, that it may be continuous with us.
It is very encouraging to see that all the desire of the Father, as the Husbandman, is to aid the fruitful branches to produce “more fruit”. All the purging is to this end, and no trial can approach the child of God but there is this distinct object which God has in allowing it.
In chap 14 He had spoken of another Comforter to abide with them for ever. The Holy Ghost being come is the forerunner of the fruit in chap 15. He is the “well” already referred to in Gen 49: 22, and John 4, 5. As Christ is always one with the Spirit—the well; so the branch, drawing its supply from Christ, gets the power for fruit-bearing. And it is the Holy Spirit in the Christian, that will lead him (if subject) into the two things which so characterised the life of the Lord as a man: namely,
“dependence” and “obedience” in the daily path on earth, these being the proofs of our abiding in Christ, John 15: 5.
From A Voice to the Faithful—vol 20, 1886
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GOD’S WORDS SUPERIOR TO MAN’S
DEFINITIONS
I would always urge upon myself, and as God enabled
me, upon the attention too of my brethren, the wisdom of keeping, as far as may be, to the very words of scripture.
We have seen lately the evils introduced through printing our definitions of the words of scripture, definitions of points that the word does not define, but the habit is commoner still. It creeps into meetings for Bible reading and edification, and some one gives a definition not found in the word, which sets the ball of discord rolling through the meeting at once. Challenges and counter-challenges arise, and edification is at an end. Alas, that this should be so general.
I take it that we only help the saints, and only edify one another, as we are enabled to draw attention to the word itself. The first time that I find it suggested to man to define the word that God had spoken, that suggestion came from Satan. “Yea, hath God said ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden”. That is, ‘Define to me what He said to you, give me your impression of it’. The devil did not want the very words of God. To have given him them, would have been to have used the “sword of the Spirit”, Eph 6: 17. Had this been his reception, he must have fled. And Satan well knows that he is powerless against the naked word of God, and against any who use it in faith. But he is able to gain his point if we give him our definitions. And Eve did not repeat in Gen 3: 2, 3, the simple word of God about it in chap 2: 10, 17, she gave her definition. May the Lord lead us to shrink from defining, and cause us to cleave to His own words.
Eve so readily fell into the snare because the suggestion of Satan exalted her. It supposed such a competency in her, so thorough an acquaintance with the mind of God, that she could give better in her own words, 160
and much more clearly, the meaning of the words of God.
If not, why did she alter His words? To be able to define points clearly, exalts us, and fosters the wretched pride of the natural heart. But can the finite fully grasp that which is infinite? I can only know as He teaches me, and that teaching is “not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but [in words] which the Holy Ghost teacheth”, 1 Cor 2: 13.
Two things appear to me to be very simple. First, It is not necessary to define what the word of God does not define, the word is complete without it. And secondly, While I may insist on it with all my might, yet if I add to or take from that simple word, I am giving a human definition.
It is surely from ‘defining’ what scripture does not define, but which the human mind pronounces as
‘ reasonable’ or to be ‘ clearly implied’ in the texts, that many schisms (and ‘sects’ too) have arisen in the church of God.
Not only is it most important for me to be satisfied with the word as it is written, if I would grow, but I must not take it out of the connection in which it stands, and try to make it fit in somewhere else. That is, I must (as is commonly said) receive it in harmony with the context, or subject matter of the chapter or book in which it is found. He who placed it there knew its place; I must be content to learn its meaning just where it is found, and from Him. Reference Bibles are often most injurious to this learning. God must be the Teacher, whatever the instrument.
From A Voice to the Faithful—vol 20, 1886
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Presently the whole universe shall bow to the claims and own the title of the Lord Jesus as set over all things by the will of the Father. But it is given to me, a Christian, by means of a body, which in itself is but dust and ashes, to proclaim now who He is and what He is. Dust and ashes which can never be annihilated, whatever they may do to it on earth, and which will exist on and on and on until it is brought into the full day of glory, when all this universe will do homage to Him to whom this body belongs, and who has cared for it and watched over it through all the changes of its place and substance.
It is immense grace that this body can witness for Christ where Christ is disowned. Angels have not such a privilege as this. It will be easy for all to witness to Him when all around is in subjection to Him, but He will never forget that which went up to Him in feebleness from the trials and exercises of the wilderness. How precious is this in His sight. Who will measure?
This world is, since the fall and since the cross especially, the scene of the display of Satan’s power and sway; but, by means of my body, I own another Lord, and in his very presence, too, who hates the Lord I own. Satan’s power is only displayed in heaven or on earth (never in hell).
From heaven he will presently be cast out (Rev 12) to exercise his power still more manifestly over men on the earth. And from the earth he will soon after be seized and bound in the bottomless pit for a thousand years, Rev 20! And thence his journey is swift to the eternal lake of fire, v 10.
It is Jesus who says (and how fully He proves it in these dealings with the enemy), “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth”, Matt 28: 18. Power that manifests itself even now, in a Christian’s “body of humiliation”, Phil 3: 21 NT.
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Do I think enough of what it will be to Him and to me to look back from that state in which I shall be with Him in my glorified body, without any opposition, and where all around will be owning Him and proclaiming Him “worthy”, to look back to this little moment when, spite of the opposition of Satan and self and the world, I owned Him?
From A Voice to the Faithful—vol 20, 1886
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“UNDERNEATH ARE THE EVERLASTING
ARMS”
(Deut 33)
No doubt this is figurative language, but it is a ‘ figure’
of an eternal ‘ fact’ to the faith that accepts it. It is not only true that all my sins are gone in the work of the cross and that I am made fit for heaven; but it is mine to enjoy the perfect affections of the heart of Him who has done it. If these words could be said of Israel as the earthly people, to manifest the way He nursed (that is the meaning here) and cared for them, surely as much, and far more, can be said of the heavenly company. It is not when I am in heaven that I shall want the joy of this knowledge. It is today on earth that I need it.
He has not been content merely to put my sins all away, never more to be remembered, and to tell me that by-and-by, after I have struggled on here, I shall be with Him forever in heaven. He has taken me in His arms, just as you take up a little child that is precious to you. This is more than forgiveness. It is the affection of the heart that is not content without thus displaying itself. “They shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand”, John 10. And if He has us there, He wants us to enjoy the fact that we are there. But it is true of us all. It has cost Him all the agony of Gethsemane, and deeper sorrow still—
the hiding of God’s face from Him—in order that He might thus take us into His arms. He values that which has cost Him so much—“when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it”, Matt 13: 46.
That pearl is the church; but we must take it up individually when the church collectively has lost the joy of it. Individual saints will have some of this joy up to the end.
“Underneath are the everlasting arms”. They never
grow weary. Heap up all the weight of sorrow and care upon me that can be (and Satan and the world and my own heart are not unskilful at this work), I still say, “Underneath are 164
the everlasting arms”. I have not to carry one jot of it alone.
He who carries me will not weary of His burden, for His are
“everlasting arms”.
The apostle John seems to have accepted by faith the affection that delighted to have him near itself more than any of the other apostles did. He shewed it in that he
“leaned on his breast at supper”, and repeatedly speaks of himself as the “disciple that Jesus loved”, John 21: 20. Do you think sometimes of yourself as the disciple that Jesus loves? That He has you in those everlasting arms, and that He will never put you down to leave you to walk alone? John did thus think of it. Had he any more claim on it than you?
We find his attitude was on his bosom (John 13: 23), as he tells us of himself in his gospel, during those closing scenes of the Saviour’s life with them on earth. He writes of it again in his first epistle: “We have known and believed the love that God hath [not had] to us”, 1 John 4: 16.
And what was the effect on him of believing it? It was that ‘all fear’ was gone. “Perfect love”, he says, “casteth out fear”—“He that feareth is not made perfect in love”, 1 John 4: 18. He was in those arms and he knew it, and you cannot introduce fear there. It is an immense thing to keep it as a present fact—“believed the love that God hath to us”.
For when, later, as a poor exile, he stood alone, as far as man was concerned, in the isle that is called Patmos, the same present love is his comfort and joy; “Unto him that loveth us”20, is still his language in Rev 1: 5.
“To know the love of Christ” (Eph 3: 19), that passeth knowing, refers to His present love. It must be so. How He loves me now and always, right on to the end—for my heart to rest in it. The apostle, in Ephesians 3 prays that the saints may know this love of Christ. But, mark—it is THERE
to be known by them. “Underneath [me—you] are the everlasting arms”.
20 Oxford Revised Version 1881
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“He layeth it on his shoulders” [those shoulders that
“hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows” (Isa 53: 4)]
REJOICING”. Who rejoices? He does. It is His joy here, Luke 15. He places the sheep there. “In his arms” (Hos 11: 3)—“On his shoulders”—“in his hand” (John 3: 35) and it is His HEART that has got no other place for us than this.
Why not dwell there consciously always? “And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us”. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casteth out fear, because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love”. If we dwell there, we shall move through this world, stamped and coloured by it.
From A Voice to the Faithful—vol 20, 1886
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First, Ishmael in the house; second, Ishmael and Isaac; third, Isaac alone
Ishmael is a type of the natural man, “he that was born after the flesh” (compare John 1: 13); but Isaac presents to us the new man, “him that was born after the Spirit”. Ishmael was born before Isaac, so we are born of the will of the flesh before we are born of the will of God.
Thus 1 Corinthians 15 speaks, “Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual”. It should be noticed that Isaac is not Ishmael, nor Ishmael improved. He is quite another person, a being quite distinct, and so the new man has no affinity with the old.
But for a time both Isaac and Ishmael inhabited the
house, and so oftentimes it is with us. We have to learn that in God’s reckoning Isaac is to be everything in the house, and we all learn it sooner or later.
What is the house? It is the place they dwelt in.
Christ dwells in us, and the old nature dwells in us. “In my flesh dwelleth no good thing”, Rom 7. In the assembly too Christ dwells—“There am I”—and there the flesh also comes, 1 Cor 14. It is therefore to be refused both individually and collectively.
For fourteen years the struggle had been going on in that house, as to who was to be chief. Isaac was persecuted.
It was the trial-time of Ishmael, the testing whether he could possibly be kept (by means of the regulations of his mother) commonly decent in the house. Hagar typified the regulations of Mount Sinai. “This Agar is Mount Sinai in Arabia”; that is, the law. It was Hagar that tried to keep Ishmael still in the house, by putting him under certain regulations and restrictions—the law.
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But it was all no use. He was not to be improved.
God’s judgment of him, pronounced long before was true, and all his actions proved it. God had said, “He will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him”, Gen 16: 12. And so it came to pass.
What a commentary is Gal 4: 29 on this early statement of the word of God, “As then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now”. (Compare this with Titus 3: 3.) How we learn from this that there must be a total refusal of the flesh, in order for us to be walking according to the mind of God—
no amendment, no improvement; but a new man, who alone is to occupy the house!
Ishmael hates Isaac; this we see, and Ishmael’s persecution proves it. Not only is Ishmael himself beyond all control (lawless), but he is a persecutor. Look at Saul of Tarsus, Acts 12: 8. It came out distinctly on the day when Isaac commenced in the house an independent existence,
“Isaac was weaned”, and all in the house, except Ishmael and his mother, rejoiced on that day. Isaac was to be free now. And what does it teach us?
The flesh and Christ cannot go on together, and the
flesh says Christ shall not have the place of supremacy. As long as this struggle goes on there is no peace in the house.
Ishmael must go out. It is God’s mind.
Worldly friendships, whether relative or not—yes, everything worldly—savours of Ishmael. Do not let us be found striving how much of Ishmael we can retain in the house, and profess Christ at the same time; for one of them must reign there, Oh, to watch more assiduously! How prone we are to apologise for Ishmael, instead of putting him out! “Cast out this bondwoman and her son” is the scripture for all of us.
And then think of the joy, whose outflow (both for you and for others) is hindered as long as strife is there. God gives this joy. We little know its fulness when we do not act 168
on the Word, because the struggle is still going on within; and this great feast has not come to you yet which Abraham made in the house the day Isaac was weaned. May the Lord lead us into the understanding and joy of all these things, to His eternal praise, and for our blessing too; for blessing to the whole church of God, and for a living testimony in this evil world.
From Simple Testimony—vol 3, 1886
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A WORD FOR CHRISTIANS
It was “between Elim and Sinai” that murmurings sprung up (Exod 16: 12), and the place was called the
“wilderness of Sin”. Let us note it well, for herein is an excellent lesson for us. God had brought them out of Egypt, and delivered them for ever from the cruelty of Pharaoh and the lash of his task-masters. They had crossed the Red Sea, and seen all their enemies “dead upon the sea shore”. They had sung with Moses, “I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea”, Exod 15: 1. And now in the wilderness, alone with God, in a place where there are no supplies and no path, they find Him not only enough to sweeten all Marah’s bitter waters, but to lead them also to Elim, where He had ready for them “twelve wells of water, and threescore and ten palm trees” (v 27), and where He had arranged their first resting-place. He would have us stop in the wilderness journey, to feast upon the tender provision of His hand for us, and to drink of these wells.
And who had dug these wells? Did you ever think? And thus far we too have gone; for we know what all these things meant which “happened to them as types”, and they are
“written for our admonition”, 1 Cor 10: 11 NT. But what follows?
Nothing but finding fault with God, that He should ever have brought them into such a place—a murmuring for bread. And is it an unknown thing for Christians to find fault with God? Think, has it never been your own case and mine? Have we always said that our wilderness circumstances are entirely satisfactory to us? Health, business, the daily occupation which He has given us—all accepted from His hand without a single murmur? And what are our wilderness circumstances but, first and most blessed of all, God with us, and going before us, and the whole of the wilderness not ours, but His responsibility, who has in grace taken us up? And is this alone not sufficient 170
to hush every murmur? But, remember, there is more. We can also trace His hand feeding and nourishing us every day, and learn that He brings to us the “honey out of the rock, and oil out of the flinty rock” (Deut 32: 13), if He causes us to prove the rocks of the wilderness. The grand lesson taught us in the wilderness with God is “to be content”. Let us read the passages Phil. 4: 11; 1 Tim. 6: 6-9; Eph. 5: 20, and honestly admit either that they do, or that they do not, find their simple answer and illustration in our walk and ways. Are we content?
And why has the Spirit of God so carefully written down the name of the locality where the murmuring began?
There is a lesson also in this. That it happened “between Elim and Sinai” has a solemn voice in it for us, and no word of God has been written in vain. Elim was God’s provision for them. It showed them what He could do, a specimen of what He would do for them, until He brought them unto Himself into “a land flowing with milk and honey”. And Sinai was the place where they undertook to do the best they could for themselves—where they gave up the grace that was treasured up in God for them all along (“My grace is sufficient for thee” (2 Cor 12: 9)) and put themselves under law.
May we ponder the lesson. May we learn that discontent and murmuring will presently land us in Sinai—
take us out of the hands of God, and lead us to do the best we can for ourselves. How many a Christian is, in the experience of his soul, “between Elim and Sinai”, and (or there actually) doing the best he can in this wilderness for himself, because God has not satisfied him! But it cuts him off from communion with God. Complaining to God about His doings is not intercourse with Him. Sinai is beset with
“blackness, and darkness, and tempest”, and no voice of communion with God reaches the soul from thence, Heb 12: 18, 19.
And now how does God answer the murmurers? And
how does He answer us if in their path? Read the whole of Exodus 16 for the answer. For forty years (the whole time 171
of their wanderings in the wilderness) He gave them
“manna”. He puts CHRIST before us the whole time of our wilderness journey—the always humbled, dependent, obedient One—the only One who accepted everything in the wilderness path as from God His Father, and without a single murmur; for the manna is Christ in humiliation, seen down here as a dependent Man. That is how God meets your murmuring and mine.
What cling we to, and what covet we in this world, which Christ (God’s perfect pattern for us) would have nothing to do with if He were here? How do you meet the exercises in your wilderness path? These are simple questions, but they search us out. Are we feeding daily on the manna—Christ, the only perfect One? He said (and are we saying it?) that His delight was in “the saints that are in the earth … the excellent” (Ps 16: 3); and though a pilgrim He was no murmurer in the wilderness. “The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage”, Ps 16: 6. When we arrive “between Elim and Sinai” we shall find the “manna” there waiting for us.
From The Christian’s Friend—vol 14, 1887
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The beginning of all decline is the heart getting away from its privilege to be for Christ, and its responsibility to take up everything in connection with Him. Among the early assemblies of Christians, while apostles were still living, decline had come in, both in Corinth, and also in the assemblies of Galatia, and the attention of Christians was directed to this; viz, Christ had not His place among them.
This is what we have here, and it is insisted on in both these verses.
No doubt there was local recovery, both in Corinth and also in the assemblies of Galatia. Still, what marks the day in which we live is not local declension merely, but the wide-spread departure of professing Christians from what would mark us if Christ had His real place in our hearts.
Every Christian must take his and her place here as one who has part in the ruin in which the assembly of God, the church, is found. The way of recovery is the matter that concerns us now. It is for me to first learn this with God, and practice it as an individual, ere I can in any way minister as His servant in the present condition of the assembly on earth.
In the book of Haggai we have a day of weakness before us. The encouragement then was, “I am with you, saith the Lord” (Hag 2: 4), and “my spirit remaineth among you”, v 5. Everything the remnant took up was to be taken up with direct reference to this encouraging revelation from God Himself to them. Nothing could be of greater cheer to their hearts than this revelation. At the same time it corrected all selfishness in the hearts of those who took it up in faith. It was no longer for them a question as to the comfort of their own “ceiled houses”, or of their gains, but of God’s house and of His interests, and of what was real gain God-ward. No one who has learnt this but has rejoiced that it delivers from the “BAG WITH HOLES” (Hag 1: 6), into which the energies of all that does not set God and Christ first are 173
now being dropped by professing Christians, those who answer now to the Jewish remnant in the days of Haggai.
“I have espoused you to one husband”, thus writes the apostle, “that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ”, 2 Cor 11: 2. Worldliness was stamped upon the Corinthian Christians whom he addresses. And what is worldliness? It has thousands of forms. It does not come to all of us in the same way, but each of us knows what it is in himself. It may be summed up in few words. It is unfaithfulness to Christ; it does not give Him the first place.
That is all, and that is decline. “I have espoused you to one husband” is true of everyone who calls himself or herself a Christian. It is not for you or for me to look at other Christians, to see how they act up to, or fail to act up to, this relationship. Comparing ourselves thus among ourselves the same apostle says is not wise. It is trying to find an excuse for the path of decline upon which we have entered. The heart loves its own ease, and seeks this path for itself where it can hold the “profession” of Christianity, but give to Christ a secondary place. It wants heaven, but refuses to give up earth.
The remedy is at hand. May that “jealousy” of the Spirit (who is here for Christ) arouse us from the worldly lethargy into which we have fallen, whenever and wherever we are not putting the Lord first. Nothing else will deliver us from the worldliness of this present day. I must go forth with the one distinct object before me, that I am here for Christ, for Him whom the world crucified. And this will deliver from it, and will also display itself in the manifestation of the life of Christ in me. No matter what others are doing, I shall “walk, even as He walked”, 1 John 2: 6.
If possible, the state of the Galatians was more critical than that of the Corinthians. He has to say, “I stand in doubt of you”. Were they really Christians? He says, “I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain”. His confidence is in God; for he says, “My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be 174
formed in you”. Ah! what is religion (and there was plenty of it in Galatia) without the display of the life of Christ? It is but the path of decline, whatever people may once have known, or however faithfully they once trod, the right path.
They are not now in it. If Christ is formed in us, His life must express itself in our lives. Anything less than this, anything other than this, is decline. It is not in law keeping, not in circumcision, nor in obedience to ordinances that Christianity consists. It is in the display of the life of Christ, which can only be found where Christ is put first.
The beginning of the church’s decline in Rev 2 is, that she had got away from Christ. “Thou hast left thy first love”.
And the way of recovery for individuals in Rev 3 (at the lowest point of the church’s history) is, “If any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me”; that is, you must give Christ His place. May the Lord not only open our eyes to see that there is decline, but give us to take individually the way of recovery which He points out to us in these Scriptures.
From The Christian’s Friend—vol 14, 1887
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MAN’S THOUGHTS OR GOD’S THOUGHTS: WHICH AM I OCCUPIED WITH?
Everyone of the race of Adam is occupied with the one or the other. I would ask the reader to ponder Psalm 119: 113 in connection with Psalm 139:17, noting that in the former psalm the word “vain” is an interpolation, and without any authority. Two things are contrasted here, it will be seen; viz, “thoughts” and “thy law”; that is, the word of God is the opposite to them, and is preferred by the writer to them.
Sin having come in, the value of the thoughts of man (spoilt as to everything concerning God, and himself too) comes before us very early in the history of this world. We hear it in Genesis 6 from the mouth of God Himself. Let us notice it well. “Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil”, and that continually, Gen 6: 5. Nor did man change after the judgment of the flood, as the ages rolled away; for we read again God’s mind unaltered as to him in Isa 55: 8-11, recorded long after by that prophet.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts”. Then He brings in (as in the Psalms) the word of God as corrective, and as that which replaces these thoughts of man. “For as the rain … from heaven … watereth the earth … so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth”, Isa 55: 10, 11
The word of God is given instead of the thoughts of men.
When we come to Christianity, God’s testimony as to
the thoughts of men is still the same. From the lips of the blessed Lord, God manifest in the flesh, we are called to hear it. “For that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God”, Luke 16: 15. What a sweeping judgment of all the so-called good thoughts of man! And again, from the same authority, than whom none can be greater, we have, “For from within, out of the heart 176
of men, proceed evil thoughts”, Mark 7: 21. Nothing good, mark, but only that which is evil; as long before recorded in Genesis 6, “only evil”, and that continually. Such is man, my reader, and such is still the record of God concerning him for his attainments of intellect, wealth, power, science, or art, whatever they may be.
Well is it for us to have reached the same judgment
of our thoughts as God has expressed, and in His word has so fully set before us; for then surely the less we encourage them the better. We shall then understand the meaning of the words as they stand, “I hate vain thoughts”, Ps 119: 113. But what have we instead of our thoughts? Psalm 139
gives the answer, “How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them!” We have God’s thoughts to be occupied with, and it is the Word that gives them to us; for there only are they recorded. But God’s thoughts now are not about us, but Christ. His thoughts of the first man we have already read in Gen 6 and Isa 55, as well as in the New Testament. He has not, and cannot change His judgment concerning them. There stands the record unalterable, because it is His.
But there is another imperishable record. It is of One who was the object of the thoughts of God long before man was created on the earth, and before the earth was created that man should dwell there. “For by him” (Christ), as well as for Him, “were all things created”, Col 1. “I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.
When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water ... I was daily his delight”, Prov 8: 23. Here we have what occupied our God from eternity, and before the creation. God formed man on the earth (after He had fitted it in beauty for his dwelling-place), and, giving him his wife, set him as head over all things. It was but a picture of what He purposed for Him who was ever “his delight”, and to and for whom He purposed to give a universal and wider dominion than Adam ever held. Adam and his wife picture to us that the thought of God was ‘Christ and the church’, when He formed this 177
first creation. He will bring into subjection to this thought of His every opposing element and creature, whether in heaven, or on earth, or under the earth, Phil 2: 10.
But if you have, my reader, as a poor sinner learnt
the emptiness of your own thoughts, you have come to God, who has, first in the gospel, revealed to you His. But those thoughts were all about His Christ—“The gospel of God ...
concerning his Son”, Rom 1: 1-3. Receiving them by faith, you have passed “from death unto life”. What are the thoughts that you are now to be occupied with? They are the same; viz, God’s thoughts and purposes to be accomplished in and by and for His Christ. It is wonderful that God should choose to communicate His thoughts to us.
Not to angels (servants), but to men, whom He takes as
“friends” into His secrets. And thus we read this wonderful unfolding of His mind through the apostle as follows:
“Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he hath purposed in himself: that in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him: in whom also we have obtained an inheritance”, Eph 1: 9-11.
God has one purpose, and that purpose is to exalt Christ. Christ is His object. He is calling out from the earth by the Holy Ghost a bride for Him. He has already crowned Him with “glory and honour”, His answer to that work which He accomplished when He glorified God on the earth. God has said to Him, as the One rejected from the earth, “Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool”, Ps 110: 1. Nothing has been defeated of all God’s purposes, and we as the redeemed, the bride, are a necessary part for His glory of those purposes. In the book of Revelation Christ is the accomplisher of all God’s purposes in judgment respecting the earth, the only one found “worthy to open the book” containing them, or even
“to look thereon”, Rev 5: 4. All these purposes He makes known to the church—“Write in a book, and send it unto 178
the seven churches” (Rev 1: 11), “to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass”, v 1.
Is then God’s purpose and object, my reader, your purpose and object while you walk the earth? Have you accepted God’s thoughts and given up all your own? The word of God (Heb 4) is a “discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart”, but even so it is as a sword; that is, it executes judgment upon them. This is important, for if a matter is corrected in the thought—that is, in its spring and source—the fruits are not seen, and therefore have not to be dealt with, as otherwise will surely be the case with us all. One may surely say, ‘Of what use is it to be occupied with anything else but God’s thoughts, since every other thought must come to nought?’ Well, this is surely the case; but we must not only talk, we must act. You will find that the thoughts you have are not always God’s thoughts, that the thoughts of your heart are a frequent cause of loss of communion, trial, and discomfort to you. “Why do thoughts arise in your hearts?” was the question of our risen Saviour to His disciples; and was followed by, “Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures”, Luke 24: 38, 45. And what did these give them? Surely GOD’s thoughts of that moment through which they were passing instead of their own! It brought it before them instead of themselves, and it showed them that God’s thoughts were about Him. “Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory? and beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning HIMSELF”, Luke 24: 26, 27. If God does not occupy your thoughts, Satan will. It may be very subtle, but self is not Christ. “We trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel” (Luke 24: 21), showed that they were occupied with their own thoughts. Let any Christian sit down, and, unless the Spirit furnishes him with God’s thoughts, he will soon find he has thoughts unworthy of a Christian; and these, being not according to the Word, are his continual trial, unless he bring the sword upon them, according to Heb 4.
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“Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things”, Phil 4.
The Lord give to us all to be mindful of this exhortation, and to be daily in the practice of saying, “How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them!”, Ps 139: 17. Connecting too this verse with Eph 1: 9, 10, so shall we say, led into their depth as also was one of old, “He must increase, but I must decrease”, John 3: 30.
From The Christian’s Friend—vol 14, 1887
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OR
HOW VICTORY AND ENJOYMENT ARE
SECURED
However much man may fail, yet with God there is
infallibility, and it is for us. There is one infallible rule, one unfailing principle, which will safely guide the Christian in every exigency and intricacy of his path through this world.
Oh, that we all had a more distinct grasp of it in our inmost souls, and, flowing thence, a more distinct manifestation in our walk that we are being guided by its maxims, that so we may enjoy this new life which we possess!
Let no one suppose for a moment that the word ‘rule’
here connected with a Christian savours of legality. The delight and joy of the new nature are to ‘obey’, and our unhappiness is to be traced (may we not say invariably?) to disobedience. Our Lord’s path was marked by this very principle of obedience all along His earthly course. At its beginning we read, “Lo, I come … to do Thy will, O God!”, Heb 10: 9. And as He trod onward in that dark, that solitary path—a path illumined by no earthly light, and cheered by no human sympathy—it was still the path of obedience. He
“became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross”, Phil 2: 8. Darker and darker it became, as it led Him onward, down, down to death, yet He never swerved from it, and in perfect obedience even there He still says, “O my Father, if this cup may not pass from me, except I drink it, thy will be done”, Matt 26: 42.
Volumes might be written, and whole addresses and
sermons delivered, all devoted to one object; viz, the restoration of the Christian when he has failed or turned aside out of God’s path. We may write and we may read no end of such works, and every word written and read may be God’s truth for the soul in that condition. But had the principle we are speaking of in this paper been maintained in all its authority in the soul, there had been no need of 181
restoration. The path of obedience bears on it, distinctly and divinely stamped, the word preservation; and if preserved in the path, I do not need to be restored to it. This is God’s desire for us, to preserve us, and to feed us, in the place in which His grace has set us; and may the means, the rule, the principle, He uses to this end, occupy more distinctly our souls as we pass along.
It has been remarked that the book of Joshua and the epistle to the Ephesians correspond in a remarkable way to each other. In the one we see the accomplishment of God’s purposes for His earthly, as in the other for the heavenly, people. In each He has them in the place which His own heart designed for them, where He can commune with them, and where He has fitted them to enter into and to enjoy that communion, Eph 1: 4; 1 John 1: 3. It is not heaven, but it is a condition which is ours on earth, and which will be fully known and enjoyed in heaven; and it is a condition, a communion, a joy, which God desires us to possess on earth, in the place of conflict and opposition, but which obedience is the sure and only way into. May we ponder it more! May its reality be more distinctly seen, enjoyed, and displayed by us!
But though His people are all thus seen in the place God’s heart designed for them, the old or evil nature remains, and it will remain in each of them until they leave this world. We have said that there is a new nature also which delights to obey, but it finds the members of the body (Rom 6: 13-22), yea, the whole man, under the influence of Satan, and all our members active in the service of sin, his power in us as the old master. Satan is moreover the enemy that holds possession, not only of our members, but also of the place which God has brought us into; that is, he holds us back from enjoying what is really ours, our own, as the gift to us of God’s infinite grace, all secured to us by the death of our Lord Jesus Christ. There is, then, this double power of the enemy—first, holding us; and, second, holding the place that belongs to us. Obedience, simple obedience, can wrest both from his grasp, and enable the Christian to 182
pass into the enjoyment of what is, through grace, his own.
There is no other way to dispossess the enemy. He is not readily going to give up possession either of us or of what is ours. It is bit by bit that he yields, a hand to hand struggle, yet it is only obedience on our part that is necessary, and with this he can neither hold us nor it.
If we read Josh 6 and Eph 6: 10-18, the truth is before us. They are simply to obey, to walk round about Jericho, in patience, the complete seven days. Not a blow were they to strike, and the result would be that the walls of Jericho, that which the enemy held in power and in pride against them, would fall down flat, “and the people shall ascend up, every man straight before him”. And thus it came to pass. The key to the whole of Josh 6 and Eph 6: 10-18 is the word ‘obedience’.
Let us pause a moment here to enquire if Christians
generally are found, through obedience, enjoying what is really theirs—a happiness which this world can neither give nor take away from them, as the calm and settled portion of the soul; daily feeding on the old corn of the land, the grapes (of which Eshcol gave a sample), the pomegranates, the figs; the soul dwelling in that land wherein they “eat bread without scarceness” (Deut 8: 9), yea, in the Lord’s land,
“flowing with milk and honey” (Exod 3: 8), on which “the eyes of the Lord are always upon it, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year”, Deut 11: 12. God “hath blessed us” (all Christians) “with all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ”, Eph 1: 3. And He would have us to be consciously enjoying them day by day.
If we are not enjoying them, it is because the enemy is still holding us back from the enjoyment. One cannot say for another what the walls of Jericho are to him; for they may differ in each individual instance. I cannot tell what they are for you, nor you for me; yet one principle applies to them all. It is only by walking in obedience that they will fall down. The whole point of the apostle’s exhortation (Eph.
6: 10-18) is obedience to the word of God. The first force of the armour is “your loins girt about with truth”, and the last 183
is “the sword of the Spirit”, which is again the word of God.
The power for you and for me to enter into the enjoyment of these heavenly things, which are all ours in title, is found only as we walk in obedience. The power is not in me, and it only connects itself with me as I walk in obedience. The power is in the man with the drawn sword, in Josh 5; so all our strength is in “the Lord, and in the power of his might”, Eph 6: 10.
Oh, may we remember it! No effort of yours or mine
will put us in possession, or drive out the enemy. Obedience will do both. May the words of Samuel to Saul fix themselves indelibly in the heart of every Christian reader of these lines: “Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord?
Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry”, 1 Sam 15: 22, 23.
It is well to know our weak point, so that not on human, but on the authority of God, we have what is hindering us exposed to us. Who can estimate the mighty power of the church of God, were each member of the body of Christ walking in simple obedience to the written Word?
What union together, what grace, what joy, what communion with God would flow thence! But when there is failure in this respect in the company, the individual is called on to hear what the Spirit says to those who have failed, “He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches”, Rev 2: 11. “If any man hear my voice” (Rev 3: 20), is the Lord’s word to you and to me.
My reader, I have done. If anything herein should draw your feet more distinctly and firmly and patiently to tread the path of obedience, I am already rewarded. Sure I am, however feebly I have spoken of it or trodden it, that it is the only path wherein blessing can be found today; and equally sure that you will reap true lasting, yea, eternal joy in it. I close these few remarks with the words of a familiar scripture, which has often cheered and encouraged me (Ps 81), commending it also to your solemn consideration. But 184
let me first add one word more. Are you conscious of having left the path of obedience in any one point? If so, let me beseech you in self-judgment immediately to return. Do not hesitate a moment as to consequences; leave all that with your God. Nothing, nothing but trouble and sorrow are before you, as long as you refuse His path for you. “Oh that my people had hearkened unto me, and Israel had walked in my ways! I should soon have subdued their enemies, and turned my hand against their adversaries. The haters of the Lord should have submitted themselves unto him: but their time should have endured for ever”. Then immediately, the enemy being subdued, “He should have fed them also with the finest of the wheat: and with honey out of the rock should I have satisfied thee”, Ps 81: 15, 16. May my reader know, and infinitely more than the writer, the satisfying power of this heavenly food, through walking in the path of obedience, on earth, and today, for Christ’s sake!
From The Christian’s Friend—vol 14, 1887
185
This especial favour is reserved for a unique company. Christians only are to have this sight of their Lord; therefore the great importance of the last word. It is not what He was on earth, nor is it here what He will be.
What He was the apostle (who had seen Him as a perfect Man on earth) speaks of in chap 1. On earth he had seen Him the “eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us”; and what He will be John tells us in the book of Revelation, Rev 1: 7; 19: 11-16. But in this passage the apostle says it is what He is now that we shall see.
And what is He now? He has entered into that glory
which He had with the Father before the world was, as the ever-obedient Son, obedient even unto death; and in John 17 the Lord prays respecting us, “Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me”—that glory which He has now, the glory which He had before the world was. That wondrous relationship too of the Son with the Father, into which He has entered, He has entered as Man, as the One who glorified God on the earth, and who could claim the glory as earned which was always His. We are to witness what that glory and that relationship are.
Infinite grace that brings us in on the ground of His own work, that work for God’s glory, and for our eternal blessing!
Blessed Lord, we shall see Thee in Thine own glory, and in Thine own enjoyment of all the affections of Thy Father’s heart! Into that full joy the Lord entered after His work on the cross. His hour of sorrow (John 12: 27) all ended with that work, and the hour of His glory began, as He said,
“Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee”, John 17: 1. If we seek the answer to the question, What is He now? the Holy Ghost, descended from Him when glorified, gives the answer through the apostle Peter. “The God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob, 186
the God of our fathers, hath glorified his Son Jesus”, Acts 3: 13. It is the answer to His prayer in John 17: “With the glory which I had with thee before the world was”; and we are to be there to see Him in it.
How does this affect us? We wander on the earth absent from Him (2 Cor 5: 6), and our faith but feebly lays hold of what He is now, consequent on the work which He has accomplished. Thence may be traced the miserable apprehension we have of our own relationship, that in which we stand with the Father; and that, alas! is no uncommon thing with real Christians. How can I know what I am with God until I see Him by faith or “as he is”?
Well, in that day I shall know it. He is now seated in the enjoyment of all the affections of the Father’s bosom, and all the love of the Father’s heart. Nothing more shall ever disturb that blessed relationship and rest into which He has entered, based on the completion of all His earthly toil. But that work also puts every Christian before God “as He is”, in the blessed relationship of children with God as their Father; and that is the way it affects us, John 17: 23; 20: 17. “As he is, so are we in this world”, 1 John 4: 17. We are in the one relationship, His Father ours, His God ours, John 20: 17.
But not only are we in the same relationship, but we are to be in the same place, in order to behold His glory; we are to be with Him in it. It is this unique favour that John, I believe, speaks of in the verse quoted at the head of this paper, because only in the same place as He Himself is in can I behold what His glory is in the place. When I see Christ in it, and see what it is as displayed towards Him, I shall have the true sense of what is my place and relationship with the Father as belonging to Christ, both, alas! so feebly entered into by me now. But this necessitates my being with Him in it, in order to see it displayed towards Him; that is, in the glory that he speaks of in John 17: 24:
“Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the 187
foundation of the world”. It is a glory that flows from love, the Father’s personal love to the Son, but which of necessity includes in that all that are His.
John looked forward with joy to that time when he,
in the company of all the members of the body, shall “see Him as He is”. We and he are still awaiting it. We shall be admitted into the “Father’s house” to see what that sphere has been, glory and affection displayed towards Him, before we are brought out to share with Him in all the glory of the kingdom. The heart of the Father has been for eighteen centuries delighting in Him, in Him who was ever His delight, even before the foundation of the world, as Proverbs 8 says. But what saint has fully entered into what that delight, that joy of the Father, in Him has been? Well, we shall see it in that day; for “we shall see him as he is”, as He is now, and not as He will be when displayed in the day of His appearing.
We are going into the Father’s house, as John 14: 1-
3 says; but the first thought is that we shall “see Him as He is” there. We are to have, so to speak, this private time with Him in His own abode, before the whole universe, heaven and earth participate in the joy of themselves giving to Him His chief place over them all. But the precious thing is the intimacy of the house. Who will picture the joy of that hour, the joy of the Father’s house? It is more than the joy of Luke 15; for this His eternal Son never went astray. It is this beloved Son that we shall see as He is. We shall be like Him when He appears, but we shall first have seen Him as He is.
“We know that when he shall appear we shall be like him; for we shall see him AS HE IS”.
From The Christian’s Friend—vol 14, 1887
188
THE FIRST MAN EVER UNDER JUDGMENT
IN GOD’S ACCOUNT
We learn what the cross of the Lord Jesus has effected when we learn that it has eternally settled for God the question of sin and sins. It has settled these two things, and it is most important to see how they have both been settled. We have the forgiveness of our sins in the work of the cross; but the nature which committed them, sin, is never forgiven. It has been eternally placed by God under judgment. As to the forgiveness of our sins, the following passages declare it is effected: 1 John 2: 12; Eph 1: 7; Col 1: 14; 2: 13; Acts 5: 31, &c. As to the nature that committed them, it is not forgiven, but the judgment of death is permanently recorded against it. The following passages bring this before us: Josh 4: 9; John 12: 31; Rom 6: 6; Gal 2: 20; 6: 14; Col 3: 3, &c. In Josh 4: 9, death, not forgiveness, is before us. As to the twelve stones placed in the bed of the river, they were a figure of the twelve tribes.
Over them roll the waters of judgment continually—those waters through which Israel passed dry shod. But as to their permanence in the bed of Jordan, the word adds, “And they are there unto this day”, Josh 4: 9.
Now in order to make this simple to our
understanding, the word of God, in the writings of the apostles, considers the Christian as if he were two men. He is solemnly warned and exhorted never to act like the one, while over and over again he is encouraged to act as the other. When the apostle says, “I am crucified with Christ”, he is contemplating the judgment of God recorded in the cross as to the first man, and speaking of himself as that man. When he says, “nevertheless I live” (Gal 2: 20), it is the new man, or the power of the life of Christ daily displayed in him, which he is contemplating. The difference is immense. There are two men in question. As to the first, who is controlled always by the evil nature, which Scripture calls “sin” (Rom 7: 18, 21), that man is under the judgment of God, and never is anywhere else in God’s account. As to 189
the new man, “created in righteousness and true holiness”, and created “unto good works” (Eph 4: 24; 2: 10), to him death and judgment have nothing to say; against him they have no claim. Rom 8: 1, as well as our Lord’s own words, in John 5: 24, both declare this to us.
For some it is unnecessary to adduce passages to prove that the Christian is addressed as if he were two persons; for others a passage or two may help. (Why he is so addressed is because he has still the old nature within him, as well as the new, and every action of his life comes from either the one or the other of these.) If then we refer to 1 Cor 3: 3, we read, “are ye not carnal, and walk as men?”
To walk “as men” is a reproach, because it is walking according to the old nature. So we read, “This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk”, Eph 4: 17. On the other hand, when we are addressed as having the new nature, we read,
“Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh”, Gal 5: 16. “He that saith he abideth in him, ought himself also so to walk, even as he walked”, 1 John 2: 6.
Timothy is exhorted to “preach the word”, because the time would come when men would not endure “sound doctrine” (the Word). We hear from the WORD that our sins are forgiven; but that the old nature, the man that committed them, is not forgiven, but is placed under judgment. Is this “sound doctrine”? Is it to be practised, or only theorised about? Is it Christianity? And is the setting up (or trying to do so) again on the earth of the man under judgment a denial of Christianity or not? To own in our daily life that the cross of Christ has put away sins, and has also definitely placed the old man under judgment, I hold to be fundamental doctrine, without which there cannot be any true progress in the divine life. It is the second part of this truth which cuts at the root of all that is not of Christ, but, thank God, which separates me definitely from the world, to walk like Christ in it. We much more readily accept that in the cross we have the forgiveness of sins, than that in the cross we have also the judgment of sin—the 190
nature of the first man. Both are true, and both together constitute what one called “a Christian” professes to believe, however short he or she may come as to the manifestation of the judgment of the first man practically. A word or two on this head.
Who is the man that God has definitely recorded His
judgment against? It is the man who is what is called ‘trying to get on’ in the world, trying to make his rest here, where sin defiles all around. It matters not to him who goes down; his only effort is to get up, trample upon whom he may. It is Gen 11: 4 reproduced every day among us. Now God has determined never to set that man up again. Strive as he may—and (if walking with this object) we may come nearer home, and say, ‘Strive as I may I have God against me, as to setting up that man again on earth. In doing it, am I, or am I not, fighting against God?’ Honours, dignities, riches, popularity, we naturally cling to them. We desire them to make something of us. But, my reader, do you in life and ways accept the judgment of God as to the man that covets them? Can you “endure sound doctrine?” or are you one of those, by no means uncommon, who say, ‘What do you want more than forgiveness of sins?’ The desires (“their own lusts”) of the natural heart still unbridled; for that is the condition of those who have “itching ears”, 2 Tim 4: 3.
What is the sum of the matter, but that “having food and raiment, let us be therewith content”? I may not have what people call a ‘home’; I may have “food and raiment”, 1
Tim 6: 8. “No certain dwelling place”, 1 Cor 4: 11. This the apostle could speak of; and if it is ours, it is but a portion of His path who had “not where to lay His head” (Matt 8: 20) when, in faithfulness to God, He trod this earth. Let me remember it, let it control me, that His path is my path if I walk like Him.
As to the second man, God will set him up here in power and glory over everything, Eph 1: 9, 10. He may go to the wall today, and take cheerfully the spoiling of his goods ‘without resisting; for such is God’s will for him who takes Christ’s path’. “The offscouring of all things” (1 Cor 191
4: 13) may register the world’s opinion of him who is willing to be even accounted a fool for Christ’s sake (1 Cor 3: 18); yet “the counsel of the Lord, that shall stand”, Prov 19: 21.
We see not yet all things put under Him, but we see Jesus (who for the suffering of death was made a little lower than the angels) crowned with glory and honour, a proof of what God will yet accomplish for Him. And as to the world, “the world passeth away, and the lust [desire] thereof”. May the Spirit instruct us yet more and more in the great defect of the Christianity around us; and in the fact that the old nature, the first man, is in the cross definitely placed under the judgment of God, and never delivered from it.
From The Christian’s Friend—vol 14, 1887
192
We fail as servants oftentimes, by getting occupied with what the enemy is doing. The perfect opposite of all this we see in the blessed Lord. The gospel of Mark, presenting Him to us in this character, shews this to us in a striking light, and remarkably so in this chapter. The enemy is busy, the shadows are darkening around His feet.
But calmly in the midst of it all, as calmly as when sleeping on the pillow on the lake of Galilee, the blessed Lord moves onward in His path of service, undisturbed, and unmoved.
What a pattern for us! He knew His work, and undistracted by all that was tossing and heaving around, He goes onward to accomplish it, Mark 10: 45.
This is perfection in the path of the Servant. He went onward with His work. It mattered little to Him what others and Satan were doing, and it did not for a moment enter into His calculations. And herein is a lesson for us, a lesson to be learnt, just as Paul once learnt a lesson when he says,
“I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content”, Phil 4: 11. It is of no importance to me to know what the enemy is doing. The only effect it may have may be an injurious one—it may deter me in my work. I believe there is nothing so important for me ever to keep before me as a servant, as this fact, what the enemy is doing is of no importance to me. It is what we find in the account of the Hebrew children, Dan 3. They were unshaken in their confidence in Him whom they served. No threat of the burning fiery furnace to be heated by the enemy “seven times more than it was wont to be heated” (Dan 3: 19), disturbed them. “O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this matter. If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and [faith added] he will deliver us out of thine hand, O
king”. This is very beautiful, it is the triumph of faith in the midst of all the efforts and works of the enemy, and it is 193
seen in men of like passions with ourselves—like helplessness to act.
As a servant following Christ in His path, it is no question with me, and no anxiety what the enemy is doing.
I have to be occupied with what is good, because His service is good, just as the fishermen have to take care of the good fish, Matt 13: 48. Blessed service! Happy the life that thus has found its only occupation. “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain”. This is the language of one who has trodden this path before us, another man of like passions and like feebleness as ourselves.
In these verses (Mark 14) we see the calmness with
which the perfect Servant met everything. Comment is needless here, for spiritual perception bows to its completeness, and the prayer only is uttered that we all may be not mere copyists, but in the power of the Spirit more simple followers in service, of our one blessed Master.
From A Voice to the Faithful—vol 21, 1887
194
THE ANOINTED ONE AND THE GRAVE
Whatever may be said in favour of the scene that is
around us, the only thing that this world had for the Lord Jesus was death and a grave. Here we see the implacable hatred of the human heart, for it was evinced to One perfect in goodness. But their hatred to what is good is here brought face to face with the simple and devoted love of one faithful heart. This woman purchases a box of ointment.
To her it was costly, to all, valuable and sweet. It was all that love could do, all that was left for a love devoted to its object, to come and anoint that one just entering into the grave. This was, at such a moment, most grateful to His blessed heart. Well He knew that it was all that she could do. He owned it. She could not stay their malice, but He says, “She hath done what she could”. They were busily plotting His death. She says, ‘In that grave will lie all that is precious to me’.
After that act of theirs, What was the world to her?
From Him they had learnt it, now they were going to prove it, that foxes had holes, and the birds of the air nests, but the world had no place, no room for Him. What could it be to her without Him? Well it had one aspect to her, and it could only have one. It was His grave, and only this. What would that woman have written over the grave which, closing over all that was precious to her, closed also over all the world’s claims upon her heart. She would have written,
“who loved me, and gave himself for me”, Gal 2: 20.
Her heart was gone; and is ours? We are accustomed
to tread softly on a grave, and such is the world to us. Oh!
to tread softly here today, with that world in all its mirth around me—the world which judged Him to be only worthy of death and the grave. The mirth and gaiety of the grave (His grave) are around me, what is there in them to attract the devoted heart? What a contradiction! The mirth of the grave!
195
It is in vain to deny it. It does not attract the devoted heart. There was something to attract in the grave where Jesus lay, when He was there. Jesus is not in it. Jesus is not there, and my heart seeks Him where He is. My affections cannot be in this scene. Can I forget that I am moving through the place which was His grave—amidst the very same people that gave Him this reward, for the world is the same world today? Has it in it any preciousness for me, anything to attract me since He is gone, Ps 23: 4?
Happy the heart that has estimated the world at its
true value, because grace has taught it to value Him! He says, “She is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying”. Her estimate of Him was that He is worthy of all; the world’s estimate, not worth “three hundred pence”, but
“worthy of death”. And he whose lips chronicled the waste of another in devoting three hundred pence to purchase a box of ointment to pour it upon the Lord, recorded presently his own estimation of Him, as he received from the world of which he was himself a part, its “thirty pieces of silver”, the price of one of its slaves.
But so it must ever be, for the two can never amalgamate. The heart that values the Lord, values Him for what He is in Himself alone, SofS 5: 9,10. For it must be at the bottom, actuating me, either her estimation of Him or the world’s estimation of Him. And then for us all it is the “world”, or it is “Christ”. The “world” to me may be very small. It may be, as it was to Judas, only “thirty pieces of silver”. But in receiving them He gave Christ up! This was the awful alternative for him. He could not hold both. Is it anything less for us? He exhorts us to count the cost, and tells us what is worldly and likely to ensnare us in Luke 14: 26-30. Not the bad things, as men speak.
If I have Christ, I have Christ alone for Himself, and all around is a desert. I am called to pass through this world, this moral scene which adjudged Him to be worthy only of death and the grave. But how? As she did, and as Paul did, “Yea doubtless”, said the apostle, “and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ 196
Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ”, Phil 3: 8. If this is not my language, I yet may be a Christian, God knows all about that, but alas, do I know anything of the devotion of that faithful heart which is detailed in all its simplicity in Mark 14: 1-9?
From A Voice to the Faithful—vol 21, 1887
197
HIS LOVE THAT “PASSETH KNOWLEDGE”
IN THE PAST ‘BEARING OUR SINS’
AND
IN THE PRESENT BEARING “US”
“He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows”.
“The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all”, Isa 53.
This passage refers to the cross. It is the past aspect of His love to me.
“He layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing”, Luke 15.
This is the present burden He is bearing. It is the present aspect of His love to me.
He, the eternal Son, the holy One, had almighty power, and thus He was fitted to bear “our griefs”, and carry
“our sorrows”, and accept the load of our “iniquity”, 1 Pet 2: 24. One adequate in strength to take all my griefs, sorrows, and iniquities. Then I have none to bear. He has risen out of the grave without them all, and I am free.
But having borne the burden of Isaiah 53—having sunk down to death and the grave under its oppression—
(“He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth”) it is all ended. He has passed out of it into the unclouded favour of God who (when bearing it) hid His face from Him, Ps 2: 7, 8. Into that scene of cloudless rest He has thus purchased the right to carry me. “Behold I and the children which God hath given me”, Heb 2: 13. “Thine they were, and thou gavest them me”, John 17: 6. “He layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing”, Luke 15: 5.
And there I am, nor I only, but every child of God.
And if, having borne all my griefs and carried all my sorrows, He has (in all the affection of His heart) placed me there on the day that He rescued me, it is His joy to have me there always, so that I am now there. I do not know anything more cheering to me than to know this. Christians 198
know their relationships and responsibilities as to the world, as they pass into them every morning. But I say, Do you know where about you are with regard to Christ today?
I am “on his shoulders” this day, and it is the joy of His heart to have me there. What a change! The Lord Jesus has so thoroughly borne all “our griefs”, carried all “our sorrows”, and our “iniquities”, that none are left. He has instead of them, on those shoulders of strength, the poor wandering sheep for whom He bore them. Never more will He bear the burden of Isaiah 53, but I am where the burden was, and where is He bearing me?
And if this is for me to know in the wilderness, for me also it is to know He bears me on His shoulders of strength in the very presence of God. I am poor and feeble in myself.
On His “shoulder” and on His “heart” (Exod 28) ( strength and affection), He bears inscribed the names of His people.
Our great High Priest is within the sanctuary for us. Our names are there. “Whither the forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus, made an high priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec”, Heb 6: 20.
If I think of the wilderness it is as on His shoulder who is carrying me ‘home’. I can only rightly think of the wilderness from there. If I think of what He is now in heaven, it is “for us” He has entered there, and to that rest He is bringing us all, “that where I am, there ye may be also”.
From A Voice to the Faithful—vol 21, 1887
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“THE MORNING AND EVENING LAMB”
It is wonderful that in Old Testament types (as now
plainly in New Testament fact), God should condescend to tell me His estimation of the work of the cross. The first of the offerings mentioned in Leviticus is the burnt-offering. It brings before us the Lord Jesus offering up Himself to God.
But it is for atonement, and as that, all goes up to God as
“a sweet savour”. God thus expresses His satisfaction in the work of Christ, and therefore His satisfaction respecting us for whom He undertook the work, for we read of the offences offerer, “and it shall be accepted for him to make atonement”, Lev 1. All went up to God as a “sweet savour”, Num 28: 6, 8, 13, 27, &c.
It is this blessed fact—what, when tested fully, the Lord Jesus was and is to the heart of God, which is presented to us in Numbers 28, in the burnt-offering of the morning and the evening lamb. It is presented for a “sweet savour” to God. We learn from this chapter and the next, that Christ is set forth as God’s continual delight. God begins all the “times” of His people with Christ, the “sweet savour” to Himself, and He ends them, as each evening closes over the camp, with Christ. It is a wonderful rest to my heart to see it. It was the record of each day. In extra delight (if we may speak of such a thing respecting Him, all of whose ways are excellent), for there was more offered, He begins all their sabbaths with Christ (v 9), and also every fresh month we find the same, v 11. So also in all their feasts (vv 19, 27, &c), that which we first find presented is Christ as a “sweet savour” to God. In the daily sacrifice the lamb was to be offered in the morning and the lamb in the evening. Christ, in His offering of Himself, is the changeless rest, delight, and satisfaction to the heart of God. God alone can fully estimate what the Lord Jesus was in all His excellences as thus devoting Himself to death, but what He wishes me to know is that in all that “sweet savour” which 200
expresses it, and which God delights in, I am accepted, Lev 1: 3, 4.
God has thus placed Christ in the hands of His people to be continually presented to Him, and by it He desires to associate us in the delight of His own heart. Read vv 2, 3,
“my offering ... This is the offering made by fire which ye shall offer unto the Lord”. The Israelites drew nigh to God in the consciousness that they were bringing to Him, in the burnt-offering, that which completely satisfied Him. It was a “sweet savour”. A Christian knows that it is only Christ as the burnt-offering—Christ in His own perfect work, that meets with full satisfaction the heart of God, but God desires he should know it. I am accepted in the offering that I bring.
How do we begin our days? God always begins with
Christ. How do we end the day? God ends it with Christ.
Must we not each of us admit, as each day closes, how poorly we have gone through the day? When we remember all the provision that grace has made for us to carry us safely through, yet how many a failure and breakdown has He seen in each of us, if only one day’s journey in the wilderness be contemplated? Perhaps the day was not begun either with God’s burnt-offering, the morning Lamb.
What then is the resource? Is it not what there is for us in the heart of God? It is Christ. The day is over, and many a stumble, many an exercise of my will has He seen, which no other eye save His has noted, but while my only true place is confession there ascends up to Him as each evening closes around the camp of His beloved, failing people, the smoke of that precious burnt-offering, the Lamb
—the “sweet savour” which God delights in (His own), and in that, each one of His people individually and all of them collectively, stand accepted before Him.
Oh, the grace of His heart that would have you always at rest with Him! Oh the tenderness of that grace which (never wrong) tells us afresh every morning, and 201
afresh every evening, of God’s own delight in His beloved Son in whom we are accepted!
Many of us begin the day with prayer and end it with prayer. Who will say anything against it? But your prayers will be woefully defective, yes, will be only hopeless wailings, if you have not learnt how personally you stand accepted before God always, through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is what we are instructed in by the morning and evening offering in this chapter. If I have not the knowledge of my own personal acceptance ere I ask anything in prayer, what is my Christianity worth? This state of things in the soul will account for the almost hopeless expressions that are uttered, as though it were very doubtful if God would answer anything that we ask.
The one who prays has himself and his own worthiness before God, and not Christ’s. I am worthy of nothing, but what is He worthy of, and what will God withhold that may be for the glory of the Son who on earth glorified Him? If also we do not get answers immediate, to what is asked in His name, yet the heart has received a very great lift out of its own immediate wants by seeing Him in whom God delights as a “sweet savour”, and who is always thus His delight. Prayer may thus result in praise and thanksgiving according to Phil 4: 6, 7.
Now if God desires us to begin and to end all our
“times” thus with Christ, it surely is that He also desires to have our hearts always and perfectly at rest before Him.
“My times are in thy hand”, Ps 31. He wishes us to offer His offerings (Heb 13: 15) to Him in their season, see end of v 2. By so doing shall we learn somewhat the meaning of that word, “thou makest the outgoings of the morning and evening to rejoice” (to sing with joy21), Ps 65: 8. It is the true ground of joy to have Christ thus before the soul.
We may connect what we have looked at in the Old
Testament with one passage in the New. “Christ also hath 21 J N Darby’s French Bible
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loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour”, Eph 5: 2. This savour never ceases to ascend to Him, and He wishes us to know it. Why?
From A Voice to the Faithful—vol 21, 1887
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GOD’S TWOFOLD ANSWER TO IT
No doubt that when God manifestly answers a prayer, the prayer was dictated by the Spirit, Rom 8: 26, 27. But the answer to a prayer in the Spirit is not always manifested to others, and yet there may be a very distinct answer. One looking on may not see that the matter prayed for has been granted, when the soul itself is conscious of its answer having come, and is, by it, at present peace and rest about the question. There are these two ways in which God is pleased to meet our prayers: the one we may call the public answer, the other the private one. Of these two the latter is by far the greatest display of His favour that I can know. It is the answer of Phil 4: 6, 7. Many persons (may we not say the majority of Christians?) seem to understand that an answer from God must necessarily be a public one or it is not an answer. When they speak of having had a ‘direct answer to prayer’, they mean only that, and this is the only kind of answer they seek for—a public one. But the public answer to prayer is not such a manifestation of His mercy and grace to me as the private one. If God should move the world and shake it to its very foundations on my behalf, that could not be so great an event as it is for me to possess the
“peace of God”— God’s own peace, about my little matter which I have brought before Him.
The apostle James brings before us Elias as an example of a man of prayer. The case illustrates what I have said. Seven times he sent his servant, persuaded that the rain which the land thirsted for was coming. The prophet had received the private answer to his prayer long before the public one came. He was at rest in his own soul about it long before the appearance (which the natural eye could see) of the “little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand”, 1 Kings 18. Faith here gets the private answer, nature the public one. I think God would have us to be more exercised as to the difference between these two. Again, the apostle Paul prayed three times about something which greatly 204
distressed him personally, 2 Cor 12: 8. No one saw a public answer to that prayer, for as to the apostle’s desire to have the thing “depart from” him, it was unanswered. And yet the supplication did receive a most direct private answer from the Lord. That answer was for the ear of the apostle alone, but so distinctly was it to him an answer to his prayer, that it caused him to glory in the very thing which, as a bitter trial to himself, he had brought to God in his prayer to Him to remove it! He will now rather keep it than have it removed. If we are instructed by what many say today—if we may regard as right the way in which they act as to prayer—only regarding as answers to them those events which run exactly in the lines they have marked out, and which shall be visible to all; then the prayer of the apostle remained unanswered. Yet we cannot fail to see that every anxiety as to his difficulty had been calmed, met, and eternally not at rest.
Is there not too much anxiety for public answers to
our prayers, and too little understanding of this private way in which (according to Phil 4: 7) God delights to meet and satisfy them? as, for example, many going out as evangelists seem to be wholly occupied with the first, the public accrediting of the man and his labours, and if you talk to them of the calmness that springs from the second, with no public or little public encouragement, it is scarcely known.
I believe that results are little sought for by the man that knows the “power of Christ” tabernacling over him. Is it a little thing to have the heart kept as a garrison by the “peace of God”? Was there any man who ever plodded on so perseveringly, or any man whose heart went out more after sinners than that of the apostle Paul? Has there been any evangelist equal to him since? Not that any one would set aside the way in which God is pleased at times publicly to answer our prayers; but we see how the man was carried on, the inner life of the soul is before us, and what sustained it in freshness and in active service down here up to the end, 2 Tim 4: 6-10. Nor was it otherwise with the Lord Himself. We want to know more of this, and less of that restlessness which is for ever looking for and talking of 205
results, and which is never satisfied without them. This last characterises the day in which we live. I would, then, pray for myself and for my brethren that we may know more of the difference between the public and private answer of God as to every matter that we commend to Him.
From A Voice to the Faithful—vol 21, 1887
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Anyone can see that from the moment sin came into
the world God has sought a people who should be separate from this vast stream of evil which has rolled over the world like a flood. Separation from is taught first; it is the negative side. Then comes separation to; and this is the positive side.
To be right with God, the first only, is not enough, although with us all it comes first to “cease to do evil”. We then go on to what is positive, and “learn to do well”, Isa 1: 16, 17.