“THE LEADER AND COMPLETER OF FAITH”
AM We all have to do with the Lord Jesus, and we know Him in many ways. Thinking of this occasion, the expression came to mind, “the leader and completer of faith”. The footnote in verse 2 helps us to see that He is the One who sets it on, note e. He is the One who sets on the whole matter of faith and He fulfils it completely. It may seem that faith applies to us, and of course it does; nevertheless it is true that the Lord Jesus, as a Man here, lived by faith. We see several references to that.
Psalm 16 contains prophetically the words of One who lived by faith, showing His utter dependence upon God (and faith would be connected with dependence), and the way in which He was found here as a Man in relation to God. The psalms bring in expressions of faith that relate to the Lord Jesus from His very incoming and the scriptures also speak of faith seen in Him in relation to what He endured. The Lord Jesus is no longer in circumstances to which faith applies; He is in glory; He “is set down at the right hand of the throne of God”. But we are in circumstances to which faith applies, and we are here in this day of faith, this day which was set on by the Lord Jesus and continues until He comes “God’s dispensation, which is in faith”, 1 Tim 1: 4. Faith is a feature that is to mark the present day, the day of faith. We are to be found here as pursuing the path of faith and we have a glorious Object.
Faith is closely allied with believing. The Lord Jesus said to His own, “ye believe on God” - that would be the case of every pious, God-fearing soul; and then He added, “believe also on me”. That would have come as fresh light to the disciples, that a Man could be an object of faith. The Lord Jesus said that towards the end of that wonderful pathway of faith.
I touched on Ephesians because we have been “created in Christ Jesus for good works”. The “good works” are what were manifested in the life of Jesus and we have been created for them, and God has acted in such a way that we should be fully endowed with all the resources that we need. I read from verse 4 onwards because it seems that the good works, being what were seen in the Lord Jesus, are not achieved by effort, but they are achieved by those who know their place where Jesus is. The statements, “raised us up together”, and “sit down together in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus”, are apprehended by faith, and by faith we know that He will “display in the coming ages the surpassing riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus”. Faith is crucial to all these things - the Holy Spirit too - but faith in us is a crucial factor and it is from that standpoint, as having that glorious light in our souls, that we can go out through the sphere of testimony having been created for good works.
CHS Scripture says, “without faith it is impossible to please him”, Heb 11: 6. The Lord says, “I do always the things that are pleasing to him” (John 8: 29), and in Hebrews we get reference to, “All these died in faith”, Heb 11: 13. That is perhaps drawing attention to how they walked, but the other side is that, “he who has begun in you a good work will complete it”, Phil 1: 6. Does this show God’s faithfulness?
AM So in every soul in whom there is faith, there is a work which will be completed. But if we want to see faith in operation without any possibility of failure whatever, we have to look to the One who is “the leader and the completer” of it. It is a precious thing to think that the Lord Jesus set it on. Faith was found in the Old Testament saints, but it was really prefiguring what the Lord Jesus set on.
RMB Would it be right to say that in chapter 11, in the list of men of faith, we see in those various individuals how they set forth one particular feature of it, whether it be the patience of faith, the obedience of faith, or the reckoning of faith; but would this reference to “the leader and completer of faith” mean that every feature of it was set forth in all its blessedness in Him?
AM Faith is that by which we are able to please God. Could there be anything that is pleasing to God that is not seen in the Lord Jesus? “The leader and completer”; He has filled out the whole matter of faith. Really this was the culmination of all God’s ways right through the Old Testament. We know that the Lord Jesus was the Creator and He created the world, but what was in mind, right from the outset, was that there would be a demonstration of faith in a Man here upon earth. You could say that was one reason why the earth was created.
DMW It has been said in ministry (see remark in JT vol 73 p301) that we look at the Old Testament saints retrospectively, but we really learn faith by looking at the One who set it on and completed it.
AM So the Lord Jesus speaks of acting in the power of the Holy Spirit, but He also acted in faith in everything. Every day was a matter of faith, “morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the instructed”, Isa 50: 4. There we see One who, in faith, was waiting upon the word of God.
DMW This “cloud of witnesses” are to be joined, in other words; they come all the way through to the present time, but we join “so great a cloud of witnesses” ourselves.
AM The cloud is growing. One definition of a cloud is ‘a body without a boundary’. That is true, we have “a cloud of witnesses”; it does not have a boundary: it is growing.
DAB Is the idea of completion entirely future?
AM No, as to the Lord Jesus; He completed the whole course of faith.
DAB I was thinking of the passage, He “gave himself over into the hands of him who judges righteously”, 1 Pet 2: 23. But then it says He was heard on account of His piety, Heb 5: 7. That was completed in resurrection. I was thinking of Abraham: he looked for a city, which has yet to appear, but as to his faith in the promised seed and the resurrection, he had those as possessions. I wondered whether that would help us to see that there are things to realise now, and it would be a shame to put off the realisation of everything we have in Christ to some point in the future. We become established when we lay hold of things that we can have now.
AM One thing that we have in the passage in Ephesians is the word “together”; here we are together, we can experience something. In finality it will be immense, but here we can experience what we will know then.
DAB As to the verse in Ephesians, it does not say, ’sit down in heaven’, and as I understand it is the character of the circumstances and the ground on which we gather together.
AM So “the heavenlies” is character. Heaven is a place, that is where Jesus is, but “the heavenlies” is the character of where we have been set.
PM Did the Lord Jesus, as going into death, see the fruit already of what that death would be? “When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see a seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of Jehovah shall prosper in his hand”, Isa 53: 10. He already saw what was going to be the fruit.
AM Yes, He did. In John 17 He speaks to His Father about it, “These things Jesus spoke, and lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, Father, the hour is come”. What depths are in those words, and then He adds, “glorify thy Son”, v 1. All that that hour was going to involve was going to be immediately followed with glory, “glorify thy Son”. His faith was there, the Father would do that.
AML Could you say something about “looking stedfastly”? Is that a real committal?
AM We have to know Him to look stedfastly on Him. It is a great feature of this epistle. Early in the epistle it says, “we see Jesus … crowned with glory and honour”, Heb 2: 9. That is His personal distinctiveness. Here we are “looking stedfastly” - the footnote says, ‘looking away from other things and fixing the eye exclusively on one’, note d. As we look stedfastly, we appreciate, in our measure, His personal distinctiveness as “crowned with glory and honour”; but as we look stedfastly we also see Him at the right hand of power. How are we going to get through, how are we going to go through this scene? There is One, the object of our faith, at the right hand of power. He is worth committing ourselves to.
AML The chapter starts, “Let us”. We have a similar idea in Philippians too, “let this mind be in you”, chap 2: 5.
AM He does not say, ‘you must’, but “Let us therefore, having so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, laying aside every weight, and sin which so easily entangles us, run with endurance the race that lies before us”. That is together.
HTF “Being full of the Holy Spirit, having fixed his eyes on heaven, he saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7: 55); is that an example of what we are speaking of?
AM There was a man who died in faith. He was superior to the circumstances, he went out in absolute confidence and faith in the One whom he had seen he “fixed his eye on heaven”. He was not looking at those opposers: He had a better object, another object, an object that exceeded everything on earth. There is a Man in heaven, the object of his faith and the object of his affections too.
DKS Could you open up what you suggested, that it is almost as if the cloud is growing? One of the wonderful things about what we have in the Lord Jesus and in Christianity is that even in death what a person has been in faith is never forgotten. You go to a locality and you speak to persons about brothers and sisters who are now with the Lord, and it is almost as though that faith is still there in that room; it never goes. Is that the very attractive sense of the drawing power of Jesus, He never stops drawing that faith out?
AM What you find is that it is not the person’s physical mannerisms, or anything like that, but it is what someone gained in their soul from a brother or a sister, something gained that leads you to Christ. That is the important thing; the effect of faith is to lead you to Christ.
PM Is His personal name important? It is the attractiveness of Jesus, His personal name, not only His office, but what He is Himself that draws our heart.
AM It was not His office that led Him to pursue the course of faith; it was what He was morally; that is greater. What is moral is greater than what is official, and what the Lord Jesus was morally is seen in that blessed pathway of faith, and that is the One whose moral greatness we are exhorted to look on.
TJH I was wondering whether we see the “leader … of faith” in the commencement of His life as well as at the end of His life looking on to the glory. I was looking at Psalm 22: “thou art he that took me out of the womb; thou didst make me trust, upon my mother’s breasts. I was cast upon thee from the womb; thou art my God from my mother’s belly”, v 9,10. There is the Leader of faith at the commencement of His life, totally relying on something outside of Himself.
AM I thought about that verse, “I was cast upon thee from the womb”; it is a very holy matter. I feel very limited in what I can about it, but what you can say is that every moment of the life of Jesus was pleasing to the Father and He lived by faith. There is a certain mystery to that verse.
RWMcC I was noticing recently, “But the just shall live by faith” (Heb 10: 38) - the note there to “just” is, ‘Or possibly this may read ‘my just man’, i.e. God’s just one, the one he owns as such’, note d. It is really seen pre-eminently in Christ.
AM That is good. We know well that the passage from Habakkuk 2: 4 is quoted three times in the New Testament. It shows that it is a principle on which it is right to live. ‘My just man’ “shall live by faith”; God could say that with full assurance, a matter of divine purpose that He should be here, honouring God in a pathway of faith.
DMW With reference to faith in the Old Testament, it is rendered “the just shall live by his faith”. It is the one time that the word faith appears; you would think that it would appear more often, with Abraham, the father of faith. It actually looked forward to this day, the time of faith.
AM You get the line of those who lived by faith, starting with Abel, individuals, until you reach Abraham, and then there is a head of a family. It is a family of faith. That was pre-figured in Abraham and is now taken up in the assembly. The assembly is a family of faith.
MIW It has sometimes been described as a principle for our life here and that would enter into the details. I wondered whether as it is expressed in this passage in relation to the Lord, it has in view that which is beyond what is here: “in view of the joy lying before him”. I wondered whether true faith, the exercise of it, has an object beyond that which is immediate.
AM It must have. The Lord had that joy. You can hardly define what that joy was. There is the fulfilling of the will of God (John 4: 34), many sons brought to glory (Heb 2: 10), the securing of the assembly, Matt 16: 18. All this was “the joy lying before him”. It was everything that was going to be brought about, the great end. Someone might think that the joy was to have the assembly for Himself, and He has that, but the Lord’s joy was not a selfish joy; the Lord’s feelings were always for the Father. He lived by what the Father said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word which goes out through God's mouth”, Matt 4: 4. That is the language of faith.
RJF In the temptations we get a distinctive expression of the Lord’s faith, from what you quote, but then, "Thou shalt do homage to the Lord thy God, and him alone shalt thou serve” (Matt 4: 10), is proceeding in faith; and then, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God” (v 7), that is seeking to be in relation to God in faith.
AM You can see that Satan was powerless against that. Satan has three weapons, “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life”, 1 John 2: 16. He has filled the world with those things. None of that was found in the Lord Jesus; He was absolutely sin apart; He was immaculate. Think of the perfection of that blessed One and what was there; what motivated Him in everything was His link with the Father and the faith that was expressed in that.
RMB Is that an important feature of faith? Even when the Lord Jesus had the suffering and the shame of the cross immediately before Him, He Himself was looking beyond it to what was on the other side.
AM What was beyond it did not in any way deaden the awfulness of what was before Him. On Lord’s day morning when we met together for the great occasion, we started with a hymn which contained the words:
The awful power of death didst meet! (Hymn 339)
We get earlier in Hebrews the One, “Who in the days of his flesh, having offered up both supplications and entreaties to him who was able to save him out of death, with strong crying and tears”, Heb 5: 7. That was faith. He felt far more than any creature would feel in what He was going to endure, but His faith remained stedfast in the One who was going to save Him out of death. That is in resurrection.
RMB I wondered whether, “set down at the right hand of the throne of God” might link to the reference to Him being the “completer of faith”? We have the advantage in a sense in being able to take account of Him now, because in Himself where He is now He sets out where the path of faith ends.
AM Indeed, that is what was in my mind in the other scriptures; it is a question of our destination: “run with endurance the race that lies before us”. We know that is the race from earthly things to heavenly things, things which do not belong on the earth. That is the great goal that is set before us, and there is One who has gone before and completed that pathway in faith.
GJR Could I suggest that Satan has a fourth weapon and it is that which the Lord met in Gethsemane?
AM Yes he does, the fear of death.
JR Despair also, it is a weapon of the enemy.
AM I have sometimes thought about Luke’s account of the strong man, which is slightly different from the others, it says, “when the stronger than he coming upon him overcomes him, he takes away his panoply in which he trusted” (Luke 11: 22), and I have wondered whether that is an additional thought. We know in binding the strong man, Satan was unable to find an advantage over the Lord Jesus in any way, but I have wondered whether “takes away his panoply in which he trusted” is a veiled allusion to the fact that Satan held men for the whole of their lives in bondage through fear of death.
GJR That is very suggestive. In relation to Peter the Lord said, “I have besought for thee that thy faith fail not” (Luke 22: 32), and it did not.
AM So Peter was one who may well have despaired; he may well have said, ‘the Lord has no more need of me I have failed Him so badly’, but the Lord had prayed for him. He loved the Lord, the Lord knew that, and his faith went through. At that time there was another man in whom there was no faith, no work of God at all, and he despaired, and there was no help for him.
ADS In Hebrews, before we have as to running the race, it first speaks of the things we should lay aside. I was thinking of the two on the way to Emmaüs; their faith was affected because of what they were occupied with. The Lord encouraged their hearts by occupying them with Himself, opening up all the things concerning Himself. Is that important? It speaks of “looking stedfastly”, our occupation, and then “the joy lying before him”; would that be the living hope we have of Him coming again?
AM That is our hope. In some of the epistles the apostle writes, “We give thanks to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ continually … on account of the hope which is laid up for you in the heavens”, Col 1: 3-5. We have that hope. Hope is the assurance of something in the future, but faith makes what you cannot see real to you because it is receiving what is from God.
DMW Is faith hopeful? It occurred to me, when we had 1 Corinthians 13 at the marriage meeting earlier this week, faith, hope and love. It seems that love is faithful and love is hopeful. I was wondering whether faith was hopeful because it says, “Christ Jesus our hope”, 1 Tim 1: 1. He is our object of faith.
AM “Faith … is the conviction of things not seen” (Heb 11: 1), and hope does not imply doubt; hope is conviction as to the future.
RHB It says in Matthew, in referring to Gethsemane, “he began to be sorrowful and deeply depressed”, Matt 26: 37. Help us as to that in relation to Him being “the leader and completer of faith”.
AM It is perfectly right for a believer to be sorrowful about specific things, it is perfectly right that we should feel things, and the Lord Himself, in taking up the place perfectly as Man here, felt things. He felt things in relation to God, the sorrow of departure from God, the way He wept over Jerusalem, but think of what was before Him. He knew the awfulness of what was before Him and it was a matter of grief to Him. We see that in Gethsemane, “if it be possible” (Matt 26: 39), but it was not. His faith did not fail, He went forward, and He met it because it was the will of God for Him.
RHB The Lord interceded for Peter that his faith would not fail. There was no question that it would not fail with the Lord. You do hear that it is said of persons that they have lost their faith, in other words their faith has failed under pressure: how can we prevent that in relation to our own souls?
AM Faith is connected with the work of God in the soul. That will never be lost. I may lose the enjoyment of being occupied with the One who is “the leader and completer of faith”. The Lord never gave up; He could never give up.
RHB What you are saying would exercise us as to being real. Paul speaks of, “the end of what is enjoined is love out of a pure heart and a good conscience and unfeigned faith”, 1 Tim 1: 5. You can travel a long way with outward appearances and with the crowd and the flow, but the tests and sorrows that arise are used of God to bring out the reality, if it is there, of what exists, or the unreality to be exposed. God is entitled to bring in tests that reveal whether I am real or not.
AM The psalmist says, “Jehovah is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup”. Now, every believer would say our inheritance is with God, it is with the Lord; He is the portion of our inheritance, “and of my cup” is the immediate portion for now, today. How am I enjoying that? “Jehovah is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup”. The cup is what has an immediate effect.
TJH The Lord Jesus is known as the “man of sorrows” (Isa 53: 3); that does not detract from Him being “the leader and completer of faith”.
AM That is what His people saw in Him, but there was something inward that they could not see, and that was the great work of faith.
DAB The Lord had asked for something for Peter that Peter should have asked for himself. Unfortunately, his self-confidence led him to neglect his faith. I remember Mr Brian Surtees saying that we cannot say his faith failed, but the courage to exercise his faith failed, and yet he was a witness of what Jesus faced. He could not have said that what he faced was unfelt by Jesus; he witnessed in Jesus more profound feelings than his testing had inflicted on Peter. It is very touching that the Lord takes charge of Peter’s case even before he needs to be recovered.
AM What wonderful grace that is! He warns Peter, “Where I go thou canst not follow me now, but thou shalt follow me after”, John 13: 36. He was going to do a work that none other could do; none could follow Him where He was going. It is grace all along with Peter in the face of that self-confidence.
DAB He learned also that love for Christ had more power than self-confidence could ever find. I wondered whether that puts it within the reach of us all; it would urge us to act out of our love for Christ.
AM Love is the greatest power in the universe.
RHB Paul speaks in Romans of having, “mutual comfort among you, each by the faith which is in the other”, Rom 1: 12. I wondered whether that underlies the importance of being available to the Lord to draw near to persons that may be under test or sorrow because of a few words of faith will strengthen theirs. Is that how it works?
AM I have received that. Maybe a quiet word from someone who did not realise that it meant anything to me, and yet it just gives one that encouragement and strengthening.
CHS It has been said that faith without the Spirit will wane, C A Coates vol 24 (Readings on the Lord’s Supper) p10. I was thinking of what is says of Stephen, “being full of the Holy Spirit”, Acts 7: 55. We need to fix our eyes on the Lord Jesus and to walk here in faith; we have to depend on another power.
AM The Holy Spirit’s mission is primarily to keep the Lord Jesus before us, "he shall receive of mine and shall announce it to you”, John 16: 14. His mission is to bring something of Christ glorified to the saints constantly.
TRC In relation to Stephen in Acts 6, the word was, “Look out therefore, brethren, from among yourselves seven men, well reported of, full of the Holy Spirit”, v 3. It goes on to say, “they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit”, v 5. I wondered whether that would confirm what has been brought in. Faith has a reward; it is a living matter. Stephen got the reward of faith and it is available for us.
AM The two go together, the Holy Spirit and faith. The Holy Spirit is a divine Person so in a sense He is sovereign and acts from His own side. Faith is something which is given to us; both are gifts by God for us to exercise. We have that responsibility.
DMW Is it not said that the Holy Spirit links on with faith and supports faith?
AM In Psalm 16 the saints are brought in, “To the saints that are on the earth, and to the excellent thou hast said, In them is all my delight”. Think of the Lord Jesus being here as an object of unqualified delight to the Father, but the saints are too, an object of delight to the Father, and as we are conscious of that it encourages us to keep the Lord before us, keep looking stedfastly on Jesus.
AAC Is that essential for the maintenance of faith? David says here, “I have set Jehovah continually before me”. If we look elsewhere our faith fails - we know that - but it is something that David did and it would help using this.
AM Faith has an object and that object is a blessed Man. If I am not looking at Him, what am I looking at? Can I have faith in anything else? You cannot. Even in nature - the most blessed relationships in nature - you cannot have unqualified faith like you can have with the Lord Jesus.
AAC So this is a mystery to the world. What Stephen saw and was maintained through, those around could not understand and the world around us cannot understand either, “we see Jesus” (Heb 2: 9) and that maintains us.
AM Do you think that Stephen falling asleep in that way, and what he said, may be an example of the influence of faith upon another? There was one of those bystanders who referred to “thy martyr Stephen” (Acts 22: 20, KJV), his testimony. There was one who was affected by a soul who died in faith.
DJK I was thinking of what has been said in relation to the Lord being deeply depressed. I was reflecting on Psalm 22, “for there is none to help”. v 11. For the Lord Jesus, there was none to help Him, but that is not so for us. I appreciate what has come in as to the Lord Jesus as “the leader and completer of faith” but also the gift of the Spirit.
AM We have been so well furnished. We have One who has demonstrated the whole course of faith from beginning to end; He is now in glory. Through the gift of the Holy Spirit we are now united to Him, we have a living link with Him, and we have the precious gift of faith that keeps Him before us as a great example for all our time here. What a blessed matter! We are richly furnished.
DAB Is union with Christ in glory an aspect of the completing? When the psalmist here refers to the saints, is the completion of the Lord’s work seen in the host that will be with Him and like Him?
AM His main work is to secure the saints: “bringing many sons to glory”; that is the main work of the Lord Jesus.
DAB I was thinking of Psalm 22, where in spirit David refers to the forsaking; he says, “in the midst of the assembly will I sing thy praises”, Heb 2: 12. That is the completion of that great work. It goes, in a sense, beyond atonement, but goes on to the union of those who have the Spirit with Himself in glory.
AM That psalm ends with His seed, those whom He has secured. Those who form the assembly in the midst of which He sings the Father’s praises.
TJH Does that look on to where it speaks in Ephesians of “through Christ Jesus” and by the power of the Holy Spirit in the assembly? Do we have all the saints there and what is mentioned in Psalm 16?
AM What is in mind in Ephesians 2, what we enter into in spirit, is the fulfilment of all divine work, “raised us up together” - “God, being rich in mercy, because of his great love wherewith he loved us, (we too being dead in offences,) has quickened us with the Christ”. That is not faith: that is actual. Our hearts are actually stirred, made to live. “Has raised us up together”; we lay hold of that in faith because we are still in bodies that are subject to decay. “Has made us sit down together in the heavenlies”, we enter into that by faith, “that he might display in the coming ages the surpassing riches of his grace”. Faith is crucial and the effect of it will be seen in the great day of display.
DAB This reference to Christ Jesus shows what God has always had in His mind, but He had in His mind One who could bring it out gloriously to completion without an input from anybody else, and give to it the heavenly character which was in God’s mind that it should have.
AM And He has used time for the working out of it, and it is time that is the setting in which faith is needed and operates.
DAB In time, each of us, like the Lord Himself, has been given a cup. It might speak of the things that enter into our lives - not everything in that cup is sweet, and it is very personal, but it comes from God and it has God’s end in view.
AM That is the great thing about faith; whatever the circumstances you can trace things back to God, whatever I am passing through, the joys as well as the sorrows.
TJH So the delight was for God. Without faith we cannot please God; I wondered whether there is a link there with faith and pleasure for God.
AM Faith is the means by which we can afford pleasure for God. It comes in in relation to Enoch. It does not say of Enoch that he did any great works, such as Abel who offered a sacrifice, or Noah who built an ark. It does not say anything like that with Enoch, but he “walked with God”, Gen 5: 24. Without faith it is impossible to please God. “For he that draws near to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them who seek him out”, Heb 11: 6.
PM Faith gives us the light. Does the Spirit give us the present experience of it? It is wonderful to have the light but Mr Raven said, ‘We get nothing by faith …, but we do not get anything without faith … faith is the way of everything, but you get everything by the Spirit’, vol 3 p86. Faith gives us the light, but the Spirit gives us the present experience and joy of it.
AM Indeed. In the light we find that everything has been done.
I would recommend to everybody a little booklet called ‘Safety, Certainty and Enjoyment’, by George Cutting. You find safety in the Light, the light that has come, the Lord Jesus has died; the enjoyment is in the gift of the Holy Spirit.
RHB Those two things are brought together in Galatians, “For we, by the Spirit, on the principle of faith, await the hope of righteousness”, Gal 5: 5. The two are put together in relation to “the hope of righteousness”.
AM The “hope of righteousness”. Paul, in Philippians, was looking forward, that he would not have his righteousness, which would be on the principle of works, but a divinely given righteousness.
RHB God reckons us as righteous as we put our faith in Christ, and that has a hope. We look to where the Leader is now and we see where the path of faith ends and that brings joy. Hope brings joy into the soul. It enters into this psalm, even though He was a Man of sorrows, He says, “Therefore my heart rejoiceth, and my glory exulteth; my flesh moreover shall dwell in hope”.
AM In that psalm he accepted everything from God in faith. “The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places” (Ps 16: 6); think of the life of Jesus here, His public service, how He was assailed on every hand, but He could say, this is from the Father, “The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places”. Then He has the hope. How much can we say that? What God has ordained for us becomes pleasant as we accept it from Him.
DAB David’s hope is remarkable because he looks forward to the resurrection and glorification of Jesus; and his hope was that he, David, too would be raised and glorified. In a sense, we are in an easier position as we know that Jesus has been raised and glorified. So when we say we shall be like Him, that is our hope, it is easier to arrive at than it was before it happened.
AM It should be. We have the assurance. Things that have actually taken place should give us confidence and strength as to what will yet take place.
ADS Does faith involve bringing things to God? I was thinking of what David says in Psalm 62, “Confide in him at all times, ye people; pour out your heart before him” (v 8); in that psalm he says, “Upon God alone doth my soul rest peacefully”, v 1. In Psalm 16 he says, “my flesh moreover shall dwell in hope” and the footnote to that is, ‘shall rest in safety’, note k.
AM That is a beautiful touch, ‘rest in safety’. Faith gives us the confidence and assurance of things unseen. When you have the assurance you can rest in safety.
There is a lovely footnote in Psalm 4 referring to committing yourself to Jehovah: it says, ‘Implying ‘security without anxiety’’, note f. That is a very testing footnote to me but one I enjoy very much: ‘security without anxiety’, and that is the portion of the believer.
“We are his workmanship, having been created in Christ Jesus for good works”. That is the life of faith, all that was seen in the Lord Jesus Himself. It follows the assurance of a glorified Man and our portion together in heavenly places.
DMW Is this the life of new creation?
AM Yes, what was seen in Jesus is for us new creation. For us it is entirely new, what God has wrought.
DMW It is above this scene, it is not the wilderness, not exactly the presentation in Colossians, our death and resurrection with Christ by faith: this is not simply what is accepted by faith as the operation of God; this is actual possession. The workmanship of God is far beyond standing.
AM The workmanship of God - can there be anything greater?
RHB That might involve what is adverse, according to Romans, “knowing that tribulation works endurance; and endurance, experience; and experience, hope”, Rom 5: 3,4. They have been described as God’s workers and they are to bring about a great result, but it is God’s workmanship, He knows what is needed and how much is needed.
AM And that chain of things ends with, “hope does not make ashamed, because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us”, v 5.
CHS So we are reminded about “God, being rich in mercy, because of his great love wherewith he loved us”; we can have faith in God.
AM We can. He is operating on totally different lines from man - “but God”. The chapter begins, “and you, being dead in your offences and sins”, and then it says, “but God”. It is a totally different order of things altogether.
Chelmsford
31st May 2025
List of initials:
D A Burr, Sidcup; R H Brown, Maidstone; R M Brown, Strood; T R Campbell, Glasgow; A A Croot, Sidcup; R J Flowerdew, Sunbury; H T Franklin, Grimsby;
T J Harvey, East Finchley; D J Klassen, Aberdeen, ID; A M Lidbeck, Aberdeen, ID;
R W McClean, Grimsby; A Martin, Buckhurst Hill; P Martin, Colchester;
G J Richards, Malvern; A D Smith, Chelmsford; C H Smith, Chelmsford; D K Smith, Chelmsford; M I Webster, Buckhurst Hill; D M Welch, Denton TX