THE HOLY ONE OF GOD
[p. 137] THE HOLY ONE OF GOD
Revelation 3:7; Psalm 16:10; John 6:67 - 69
I wish to speak about Christ as the Holy One of God. He is spoken of in more ways than I can now enumerate; but He is said by Peter to be the Holy One of God; and He Himself says to God: “For thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol, neither wilt thou allow thy Holy One to see corruption”, Psalm 16:10. In the verse read in Revelation He calls Himself “the holy”. “These things saith the holy”, Revelation 3:7. The demon cast out of the man in the synagogue said he knew the Lord as the Holy One of God, Mark 1:24. The Lord did not accept that testimony, and He caused the demon immediately to go out of the man in whom he was, and through whose vocal power he spoke, for He would not receive testimony from a demon. There are those now who make much of the holiness of certain saints, canonising them, but all true saints are holy. The writer of the epistle to the Hebrews addresses them as “holy brethren”.
The epistle to the Romans develops the thought of holiness in christians, saying that we are to yield our members as instruments of righteousness to God. Righteousness comes before holiness; so that in that process we have our “fruit unto holiness”. The exercise of righteousness in our members yielded to God develops holiness; and the process of holiness qualifies us to testify to the Holy One of God. It is significant that this great feature of Christ is introduced by Himself in writing to the assemblies; and particularly that He selects the assembly in Philadelphia to which to address Himself in this way. That assembly is to be regarded as representing the whole assembly in these last days of ours. The Lord had peculiar pleasure in addressing it, as He always has where there is love. His heart seemed to be free to speak of great things to this [p. 138] assembly, things personal to Himself, and personal to the assembly; not only to Philadelphia, but to the assembly as a whole. He tells her that there are those “who say that they are Jews, and are not, but lie”, verse 9. He is speaking symbolically; He is not speaking of literal Jews, but of Jews that are so in heart and spirit, whose praise is of God and not of men. He is speaking of real christians, that is what He has in mind; and there are those who say they are such, “that they are Jews, and are not, but lie”. Such are of the synagogue of Satan. They would symbolise those in christendom who claim prior rights, regarding themselves as the ancient people of God. Romans 2:29 shows who the real Jews are. It is no question of a system being owned because of antiquity, asserting its right to priority as a church because of this; the real Jews are those who are such inwardly, and circumcision of the heart, in spirit, not in letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God. The Lord says of the unreal ones, “I will cause that they shall come and shall do homage before thy feet, and shall know that I have loved thee”, verse 9. That is a most precious thing for those who love the Lord Jesus and know His love for them. It is enough, you might say, to know that love and be responsive to it, but He says, Others are to know that I love you.
One of the most interesting things is the fact that the Lord is bringing this about. He is doing it and will do it; He will show that certain ones are the objects of His affections. I want to be one of those. The prophet who wrote these words of the Lord Jesus knew the Lord’s love; he is called several times by himself in his gospel, “the disciple whom Jesus loved”. His pen would run freely when he came to write these words, “and shall know that I have loved thee”. That is the whole assembly; not simply one locality, but the whole assembly. The Lord Jesus, we are told, loves the assembly; He loved it and gave Himself for it, and He says, In [p. 139] these last days I am going to make certain ones know that I love you still. Every one of us who loves the Lord would say, I want to continue in that, so that it may be known that He loves me. He loves you because you are His; but there is such a thing with the Lord, as there is with each of us, as loving what is lovable, and a lover of Christ is most lovable in His eye.
So it is that He has liberty here to speak of Himself as the One who is holy. And surely it is that we might have this apprehension of Him, and have it as an outlook in our walk and ways, that the Lord Jesus is holy. As I said, there are many things He is said to be, and this is one of the most important. He is holy; and He says so Himself: “These things saith the holy, the true”, verse 7. Holiness is one of the most important things in the Old Testament Scriptures, and the Lord Jesus constantly brings it forward. “Hallow yourselves therefore, and be holy”, Leviticus 20:7. “Holiness becometh thy house, O Jehovah, for ever”, Psalm 93:5, etc. Moreover Scripture says, “for whom the Lord loves he chastens, and scourges every son whom he receives”, Hebrews 12:6. And what for? That we might be partakers of His holiness. We are brought into accord with God and with Christ, and with the Holy Spirit too, and the brethren in this process of holiness. It is the fruit of the Spirit. It is not acquired by faith, although faith must underlie all our exercises: it is acquired by the Holy Spirit in the practical way of the exercise of righteousness. Scripture says, “ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end eternal life”, Romans 6:22.
Before I come to Peter in the last scripture, I want to speak about Psalm 16 as referring to our Lord Jesus in the grave. Perhaps we have not touched on it much in this connection; but it is most touching and affecting that the Lord Himself refers to His being the Holy One of God as actually in the grave. That our Lord Jesus Christ lay for three days and three nights in the grave is most solemn. He says Himself: “thus shall the Son of man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights”, Matthew 12:40. How thoroughly He became acquainted with the earth! Man had been taken out of it. The penalty was, according to Genesis 3: “For dust thou art; and unto dust shalt thou return”. That was the penalty on man for having sinned. Every burial reminds us of that; the cemetery reminds us of it, if we are capable of being reminded. People put it far away from them, but still these things remind us of this solemn fact, that man through sin incurred death and burial; that he shall return to dust.
Now our Lord Jesus Christ took on manhood, but He did not return to dust. His death and His condition in His burial were as unique as His condition in His life here below. His condition as a Man here, born into this world, was unique; there has been no other Man like Him before or since. “Who shall declare his generation? for his life is taken from the earth”, Acts 8:33. The condition which He took in flesh and blood never existed in any other man, and never will do so; nor will it again exist in Him. It was holy and absolutely unique, the condition of Christ in humanity here below. He will never be in that condition again; but still, it is treasured up before God, as the manna was treasured up in the ark. The “hidden manna”, Christ as here below, is to be fed upon. Then His death was unique — not as an ordinary man’s death. When Pilate sent the messengers to inquire as to His death, He was dead already. Pilate did not expect that. They broke the legs of the two thieves, but not of Jesus: “Not a bone of him shall be broken”, John 19:36. He was unique in dying; there was no death like His; He died of Himself. John would give you to understand it was an act of power, for no one took His life from Him; He laid it down of Himself, John 10:18. He cried with a loud voice, which denoted strength. His dying was unique, no other man has died [p. 141] as He died; in every way He has the pre-eminence. And so in His burial: it is said, “And men appointed his grave with the wicked”, Isaiah 53:9; they had no other thought than that He should be put into the common grave of the criminal. Could these men do as they wished? No, they could not, He was with the rich in His death. How was that? God took care of that. He was not with the wicked; although He was crucified with the wicked. He died before the two thieves. He says to the converted thief: “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise”, Luke 23:43, but He went into paradise before the thief. He did not say, Today shalt thou go with Me to paradise, for the thief came in after the Lord. I am speaking of the fact that in His death He was the Holy One of God, and did not see corruption. All these things point to the uniqueness of Christ, whether in life or in death.
And so, too, in resurrection: I do not believe any other person risen would be like Christ in His resurrection. The facts relative to His resurrection are different from those of all others. He came out of the grave without moving the linen cloths in which He was bound, except the napkin that was about His head; somebody folded that and put it aside by itself; otherwise all was as it had been on His blessed body. This, I believe, is what John’s account conveys. These remarks bear on this psalm in which the Lord says to God, “For thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol, neither wilt thou allow thy Holy One to see corruption”.
I now come on to Peter, so that we may see how we arrive at this; because in dealing with the truth we must learn to arrive at it. Things are stated objectively, and as we take them in we have the Holy Spirit to give us an understanding of them, but then, there is the arrival at them on the principle of experience. When we come to what we call ministry meetings, we come together as brethren, some of whom have something which they give out. I am referring to 1 Corinthians 14. The first [p. 142] thing mentioned there is a psalm, that each of us has one; that means experience. Again in Colossians we are enjoined to admonish one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. In this connection Moses represents ministry that comes to us, he conveyed messages from God to Israel: “The Lord spoke to Moses saying, Speak unto the children of Israel and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord ...”; that is the principle of Moses’ ministry. But then, the effect of listening to Moses would be that godly ones would write psalms. The Pentateuch is composed of five books, that is what the term signifies; the Book of the Psalms is also composed of five books and it corresponds, in a sense, with the Pentateuch.
I am speaking in this way because what Peter says in this verse, John 6:69, is on the principle of a psalm. It is not given here as an immediate revelation such as we get in Matthew 16: there the Lord says to all the disciples, “But ye, who do ye say that I am? And Simon Peter answering said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God”, Matthew 16:15,16. That was not a psalm; that was a revelation, because the Lord especially says, “... for flesh and blood has not revealed it to thee, but my Father who is in the heavens”, verse 17. It is a revelation that came immediately; it is not a psalm. We are to have both, but in the passage quoted from 1 Corinthians, the first thing mentioned that we are to bring is a psalm. In that same section we get a revelation, one sitting by has something revealed to him; that is not a psalm, it comes into his soul immediately from God. But I am speaking now of the psalm, what I come to, not in the assembly, but may be in the wakeful hours of the night, or in my workshop, or at my desk, or sitting in the train. I am able to abstract myself from what is going on around me and think of God. “Lord, thou has been our dwelling-place in all generations”, Moses says in Psalm 90. This is not, “the Lord spake unto Moses”, it is the outcome of his knowledge of God, it is his own production — his psalm. It suggests 1 John 4:16: “God is love, and he that abides in love abides in God, and God in him”. What an experience that is! Moses says further, “... from eternity to eternity thou art God”. He knew God; he dwelt in God, we may say; and hence could speak of Him in that experienced way.
Peter affords us something of this here. He says, “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast words of life eternal; and we have believed and known that thou art the holy one of God”. The word we is emphatic, meaning that Peter is calling attention to himself and his fellow-apostles. They are called the twelve here by the Lord; He never calls them apostles in John, nor are they ever called apostles in John even by the Spirit; but they are called the twelve, so that we can easily identify them. The word twelve implies that they were subject to Him together, and amenable to Him and to each other. This involves love to the Lord and to one another; Peter would not be envious of John, nor John of Peter. The Lord had prayed for them that they might be one, as He and the Father were One. The word twelve directs us to the twelve apostles, and as remarked, Peter refers to himself and his fellow-apostles when he uses the word we in this verse. He plainly states that they were definitely with the Lord in the testimony, unlike those disciples who “went away back and walked no more with him”, John 6:66. His word to the Lord is, “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast words of life eternal; and we have believed and known that thou art the holy one of God”. “We have believed and known”; he refers back to soul history, and that is what I want you to have in mind. As I get a new thought by the Spirit of God, how am I going to use that thought? Am I going to let it slip away? No. I must do as Mary did, she “kept all these things in her mind, pondering them in her heart”,
[p. 144] Luke 2:19. She was a treasury; she put the things where they would be safely kept — the things that came to her from the Spirit of God — and took them out and worked over them as she had opportunity, pondering them in her heart; and thus she grew. That is the idea, that we should grow and add a psalm. When the Lord Jesus was on the cross His mother Mary was standing by Him. Simeon had said to her: “and even a sword shall go through thine own soul”, Luke 2:35; and it did. Think of the feelings of that mother as the Lord Jesus, her Son after the flesh, was crucified before her eyes! But she was standing at the cross, and the Lord saw her standing there; He saw John standing there too, and said, “Woman, behold thy son”, John 19:26. You may say, He is speaking about Himself. No, He is not speaking about Himself, He is speaking to her about John. He says, John is your son; and He says to John, “Behold thy mother”, as if to say, You and she are henceforth to be in the relationship of mother and son, and son and mother. Thus she was constituted the mother of John whom the Lord loved, and from that hour John took her to his own home. No one had that relation with the mother of Jesus, but John. What conversation John would have with Mary, as he had that distinguished woman in his house as his mother, and he there as her son! Mary represents the matter of experience of which I have been speaking; she could speak to John of much that the Lord had said and done which only she knew; she could say, I weighed these things over, I pondered them in my heart and I kept them there. They became, as it were, psalms to her. “And even a sword”, says Simeon, “shall go through thine own soul”. Think of a woman like that — to have her soul pierced by a sword! But think of the experience of it! And how worthy she was as a psalm-maker in the things she had heard and seen in Christ, that perhaps no one could hear and see but herself.
[p. 145] And so it is here that the apostle Peter says, “we have believed and known that thou art the holy one of God”. The saints are called “holy brethren”; but He is the Holy One of God, the true Aaron of God; He, who is the Minister of the sanctuary, who officiates in the holy places. Peter says, We know that; we have believed, and we believe it now. This implies that those who had left the Lord and walked no longer with Him did not know Him. Maybe there is somebody here who has turned away from the Lord. “From that time many of his disciples went away back and walked no more with him”, verse 66. Think of the solemnity of that! Think of going back from the holy and blessed Person of Christ! They “walked no more with him”; it is a settled thing, and we must say, for ever. How solemn! Peter says, “we have believed and known that thou art the holy one of God”. Would Peter not know how to take part in the assembly when the time came? When the Holy Spirit came down from heaven and entered into Peter and the others, they would serve in the assembly in the recognition of the Lord as the “minister of the holy places and of the true tabernacle, which the Lord has pitched, and not man”, Hebrews 8:2. Peter would know how to take part in the service of God. As the saints in those early days came together in assembly, Peter would rise up and speak to God; he would know that the Lord Jesus, and not the high priest at Jerusalem, was Minister of the sanctuary. In Acts 1 it is said the Lord “assembled with them”. Peter would apprehend then that the Lord was the Holy One of God, the true Leader in the assembly. And so it is today in the spiritual sense: as coming together in assembly, we are to understand, not only by the Scriptures but by experience, that Christ is the Holy One of God, and that He is the Minister of the sanctuary, of the true tabernacle which the Lord has pitched and not man.
I have brought this before you so that we might all [p. 146] have this subject of holiness before us, how it is to be reached; how the Lord is the expression of it, and that it is a matter of experience; that we apprehend Christ, not only because the Scripture says so, but by experience in assembly meetings, that He is the Holy One of God. As such He is the true Aaron who carries on and officiates in the service in a spiritual way, and leads us on in that service so that we worship God in spirit and truth.