CONFIDENCE IN GOD, IN FOUR ASPECTS
[p. 18] CONFIDENCE IN GOD, IN FOUR ASPECTS
Psalm 32; Job 42; 2 Samuel 7; 1 Kings 10
I desire to present the subject of confidence towards God in four aspects. Psalm 32 shews how the heart turns to God. Here, we may say, it is the first order of confidence, that of the sinner. The person who understands grace best is the person who confesses his sins best. It is the non-understanding of grace that makes a person timid to confess his sins. There would have been no necessity for grace if there had not been righteousness. Grace reigns through righteousness. The first thing the psalm insists upon is the completeness of grace. “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven”, etc. The Lord clears you altogether. The thief on the cross is a perfect blank, so he is a perfect example of grace. He has no past, he is a thief; no present, he is on the cross; and no future, he has nothing to expect from God or man, therefore he must be a recipient. He cannot dictate terms. Grace proposes a new Person and a new place. “This man hath done nothing amiss”, and the Lord says to him, “To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise”. He exchanges his own- condition as a man for Christ’s. God’s righteousness places him in the highest place, in the presence of God, that’s what God has done for a man entitled to nothing — unrighteous — a perfect blank as to his past, present and future. A person who has nothing must not in anywise modify what grace puts upon him, else he goes back to the blank. Grace proposes a thing to him, he is entitled to nothing but judgment; grace comes in and clears him entirely, and now he must be essentially subject to what grace proposes, namely, he cannot take a lower person than the Person of Jesus, nor a lower place than the paradise of God.
Grace says, ‘Everything on your side is gone, and now I will act as I like’. The thief on the cross does propose modified terms; Christ meets him with, “To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise”. “I can now do with you as I like”. You cannot have this too clearly, that everything has been blotted out by the blood of Christ, and now He will write on your heart a new order of things. Scripture presents the effect, you learn what grace is, you have nothing to keep up, and the effect is that in your spirit there is no guile.
The woman in John 4 is afraid in the morning to face the men; in the afternoon she has seen the Lord, and she has nothing to cover now, for in her spirit there is no guile. They may say what they like now, all is out, God has cleared it away, and you cannot make more of it than God does. I am prepared to incur reproach. We have to bear it, and if we have failed in unconverted days we cannot get rid of the marks until the judgment-seat of Christ. But then grace has come in and cleared it all off and put us on an entirely new ground before God. But supposing you have failed again, you are astonished to find you do wrong and that you are a failing person. You ought not to do wrong, but “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness”. Again, you find you have sin in you and you feel it ought not to be there. What do you do? In one sense I am not sorry when people are in Romans 7. I wish more people had been there. You may try to cloak or excuse yourself when you fail, if you have a tender conscience, and say, “it was so-and-so”, but that is not confession, and it is not for blessing to excuse yourself. You are not to wait for the law to find you out, you are to tell on yourself. I stand before God against myself, and the better I tell out the things, the clearer I get discharged. Why are so many christians [p. 20] unhappy? I have no doubt because they have never made a clean breast to the Lord of their condition. He has turned over a new page in the ledger. The more fully I confess it, the more I enter into the enormity of the thing in His presence, and instead of its leading to recurrence, if you confess to God and know what it is to be in the consciousness of His solemn presence, you have a horror of that sin you have not of others. You have seen it as He sees it. Hence the scripture says, “Godly sorrow worketh repentance”. I never saw a person so hardened that he was not sorry that he had done the thing, but repentance is that I repudiate the principle that does it, not that I regret the tarnish on myself and am sorry that I made so little of myself, but I repudiate the thing as before God.
A child will cry and beg your pardon, but he will not tell you why he broke the window — that he was in temper; he will not deny the deed, but he will hide the motive. Confessing the motive, that is repentance. In this psalm he says, “When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long”. He is all withered up. That person is in an unhappy state. I will tell you why, because he has not made a clean breast of his state. Grace reigns through righteousness. “I said, I will confess my transgressions”, etc. I know One who the moment I come meets me, when no other eye could pity; to Him you disclose your motive, your intentions, your little spiteful ways, and the like.
Where is there one to whom you can disclose all the ramifications of the evil that is working in you? Your dearest friend breaks off when it becomes too personal — we are afraid to make little of ourselves. Oh, it is a moment of unspeakable blessing when I find out how degraded I am, but that there is One to whom I can tell it all, to whom I can unfold the whole secret workings of my evil heart, who will meet me, and who says, “He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us”. ‘I not only forgive you, so to speak, for soiling your dress, but I will put a clean one on you so that neither you nor I shall see the soil, it is no longer to be a trouble to you as a thing standing between you and me’. I do not at all deny that we bear the marks of our folly all the journey through. It is said to David, “now therefore the sword shall never depart from thy house”. It is not that he did not go on with God. The more I understand the love the more I insist on the righteousness, because His righteousness is the security for the permanency of His love. In the epistle of John we get love and righteousness, in the Hebrews grace and sanctification. The effect produced upon me is there is no one else to look to. Jonah is brought to this point, “I will look again toward thy holy temple”.
In Psalm 107 there is every variety of distress, but you can never be too low down to cry to the Lord, and He will hear you. There is a great lack of this confidence.
The second aspect of confidence (Job 42) has to do with condition. Condition and conduct are most difficult to explain, for people think of their condition by their conduct. Here it was not conduct at all. Job’s conduct was excellent. It is a wonderful thing for a person whose conduct is excellent to get the sense, “I abhor myself”. Many a person does when his conduct is bad, but this is an experience of a different kind altogether. Job was a perfect example, “none like him on the earth”. Satan was on one side, God on the other, and Job in the middle. He was depending entirely upon God’s gifts, and God says, ‘Take everything from him’. He is deprived of his property, bereaved of his family, and he loses his health — three things which reduce a man to a spectacle of misery. He first loses [p. 22] the things he could enjoy, and then he loses the power of enjoyment. Job’s trial is that God does not interfere on his behalf. If you only hear of the love of God, and have not been taught what the wretchedness of man is, you will be liable to the same thing and will always be expecting that God will do something for you in your own sphere. The higher the sense of your elevation in Christ the greater will be your sense of your moral degradation in the flesh. Paul had a higher elevation than any other man, and he had a deeper sense in himself of the moral degradation of man.
Job is brought to this, “Now mine eye seeth thee, wherefore I abhor myself”. Every christian is suffering either from disappointments or obstacles. Disappointments come when you are like a fly in honey, you will not go on, and obstacles when you cannot go on. Jacob’s life was all disappointments, and Joseph’s was all hindrances. I know of no experience I covet more than “I abhor myself”; it is not that ‘I am vile’. Every christian says that he is vile; I never heard of one that did not, but this is a different experience altogether. If you abhor yourself, would you expect love, health, or favours? Not a bit of it! I assure you the fact is that you would be surprised at the favours of God. I used to be terribly disappointed that God did not do this thing and that for me; now I am positively surprised at His mercies. Job will have such a sense of his unfitness for God, that he will expect not one single thing; he will walk out of it like a man would walk out of his clothes when he has had the pestilence! And the Lord turned the captivity of Job when he prayed for his friends; then he had confidence in God about other people. If you are nobody, then God must be everything; you are nobody, very well! Then you do not want anything for yourself. What had troubled [p. 23] Job was that he wondered God did not demonstrate His interest about him.
The first thing when you get into Canaan (heavenly ground) is circumcision, is that I have no mind of my own; I have God’s mind, not my own. There is a principle that would go counter to Gods will; then I must have the Spirit of God, or the flesh will carry the day. “No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is better”. Man likes the old best.
God does not grudge a man anything. He gave Job twice as much as he had before.
Now I turn to 2 Samuel 7. The first two scriptures are connected with ourselves, the second two with God. It is what God thinks about me. The Lord propounds it in the parable of the prodigal son, what the father feels for the prodigal. Every one of us takes his place in nearness to God just in proportion as we know how He feels about us. Confidence, I need not explain to you, is when I act on the feelings of another about me. I knock at the door, or perhaps I do not knock, but turn the handle and go in; to another I do not go in unless he asks me. Presumption would be acting on my own feelings. Confidence is a greater thing than devotion. Every one knows, who knows anything, that a mother would rather the child would say, ‘Mother, I believe you would give all the world for me’, than, ‘I would give all the world for you’, unless she was a bad mother. I give God credit for what exists in His heart; I am answering to his feelings about me. That is what David did when He went in and sat before the Lord. When I know what He feels about me, I am not acting on my own thoughts or views, but on His.
The fourth confidence (1 Kings 10) is not the confidence of a servant merely, but what every saint ought to know. The queen of Sheba is presented to [p. 24] us as one who came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon. In 1 Corinthians the old man was not looked upon by the saints as an intruder, so the apostle corrects this want of sense by bringing in Christ as wisdom. The queen of Sheba came all the long journey, and now a greater than Solomon is here.
It is not only a person loves me, or that they confide in me, but I want wisdom. I know my children love me, but I am not so sure of their wisdom. If you make a person your confidant who has not wisdom, you have committed yourself where you will be badly handled.
I want a sense of His unparalleled greatness as the wisdom of God. The queen of Sheba communed with Solomon of all that was in her heart. I often say, give Christ the key. There is not a thought hidden, it is the sense of what He is to me in His individual greatness. In Jonah we have the aspect of Christ in His death, in Solomon His wisdom; eye hath not seen it, ear hath not heard it. There is to be nothing hidden, it is an action of extreme importance to our hearts; you let Him see all. It is not going to Him for answers, but you confide to Him the whole of your heart, you have such a sense of what His wisdom is that you give Him the master key. No matter how peculiar the locks may be, the master key will open them all. You cannot make a person your confidant unless you know he has wisdom, and you make him your master.
What makes me proof against the man of evil and the woman of flattery? Wisdom! You must get the higher thing to be proof against the lower. He shews me the path of life, which the vulture’s eye hath not seen. The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom. The effect on the queen of Sheba was that she was entirely occupied with the things that concern Solomon. She had everything which the world could [p. 25] give, or attract her with — camels, gold, precious stones — all that could minister to these poor hearts, but she is brought into a scene that surpasses it all. It was the personalities of Solomon that impressed her, every little thing belonging to him, and she loses consciousness of her own condition in an ecstasy as to him. Your proper element is a transport, an ecstasy with God, it is the highest order of enjoyment, not enthusiasm, nor by fits and starts, but always. To man I am sober, to God I am beside myself.
Paul in the third heaven was collected about everything but his connection with man, “Whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell”.
I have no doubt the reason why there are so few queens of Sheba is because saints will not take the trouble she did. People often think it a great trouble to go a few miles by rail. Did you ever lose anything — a night or a day — to seek Christ? She put herself to extraordinary inconvenience to see Solomon. May the Lord lead our hearts practically, beloved, to understand what a christian’s life is.
It is not a melancholy life if I can live in an ecstasy. If I can get conversant with the things that concern my Lord, with the scene where He is, my heart is in an ecstasy, no more spirit but for praise, ‘My soul is all transported’.
The Lord lead our hearts, beloved friends, to see that whether we take the lowest point of our own ruin and shame, or come to the highest point — Christ, the King of Glory — self is lost. Having to do with Him, I go on to Him, and as I do, my heart is set free, I have lost myself in delighting in the true Solomon.