CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 3
He indicates by the withered hand the state of Israel at the time, no power to work, yet they were to keep a sabbath day. He comes in and indicates the great sabbath He will keep, and shows them that they cannot do anything. He looked on them with anger, distressed at their hardness of heart. From every side they come to Him. North, south, east, west - outside Israel from all sides - beginning from the centre, which was Jerusalem. You get the opposition from the Pharisees, and from the Herodians, and also the acknowledgments from all parts of the country. He [p. 143] would not accept testimony from the unclean spirits. He changes His place again, and goes up the mountain and calls to Him whom He would, and He ordained twelve to be with Him, that He might send them forth to preach in concert with Himself. This is to increase the testimony. It is important to notice that as the rejection increased, so the Lord spared no means to correct it. He gives them every chance. Twelve is an administrative number. It was a favour of the Lord to send forth His word. Wherever there is gift there is favour.
Verse 20. His friends say, “He is beside himself”, because they had not time so much as to eat bread. A beautiful touch for the servant. He was so intent on His work that He would do nothing else. Nothing is so mistaken as the way men speak of service for God. There is often great activity without communion, but the first essential is communion. The Lord helps us out of our own troubles, that we may be ready for communion with Him. He says, I will sympathise with you. There must be sympathy before there is communion. Then you can be occupied with Him, and you render to Him the most precious thing you have.
Verse 22 brings you to a more distinct crisis in the history of man, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. The scribes had the word of God - they were the great writers-out of it - and here was God’s Son, and they did not know it. What a comment on human intellect dealing with the word of God! You find the plot thickening - the opposition to Him increasing, but He is meeting it at every point.
Verses 28 and 29 were fulfilled in the case of Stephen. Such are never forgiven on natural ground again. There is no hope under the old system; grace must come in. Saul, we find, has to come out of the old system. He was a party to the murder of Stephen.
Verses 31 - 35. The Lord introduces another thing.
[p. 144] He brings in a new relationship to Himself - it is of a new character. My relations are those who do the will of God. Therefore we find in the next chapter how He brings in His word. Natural relationships are to be superseded by new relationships. The word is the agent by which this relationship is formed.
In the present day I do not think there is lack of gifts, but there is a lack of devotedness, so the gifts are not developed. A man thinks, At any rate, I can preach the gospel; but if he seeks to be a servant to the church, he finds he cannot go on with the world. It has been said the first thing is to get a soul turned from hell to heaven, but it is a great thing to get one out of earth for heaven! It is a great thing for the servant to get hold of in any measure that God’s Son was on earth yet never left heaven. If He sat with little children, or stooped to the smallest thing in ordinary life, He never left heaven in doing it. You may come down to domestic duties in the same way if you have your roots in heaven! A christian can say, I did belong to this scene, but I do not now. There is more power in your saying it than there would be in an angel saying it who never belonged to this scene. The power that wrought in Christ works in us. It is God’s power, but “in us”, that is the wonder. How little we meditate on what Christ was down here in His path of service and of rejection!