THE PLEASURE OF GOD
Gordon McKay
Ezekiel 18: 23; Luke 2: 8-14; Hebrews 10: 4-10, 38
What I have in mind to speak about is the pleasure of God. I want to raise the question whether each individual here might be one in whom God finds pleasure. Certainly, it is God’s thought that you should be so, that you should be one that God finds pleasure in. I do not know whether that has entered much into your exercises and thoughts and plans, whether you have any desire to be pleasing to God. I believe that if God is working in your soul, something of that must come into your mind. And I suppose your conscience in any case – for everyone has a conscience – bears a certain testimony as to whether you are pleasing to Him or not. I read the verse in Ezekiel 18 to point out that if you are on a wicked course, death is the end of that, and judgement. God has no pleasure in that. His righteousness and holiness demand it, that if you go on in a course of self-will and sinnership without listening to the glad tidings, in the end death is going to come on you as a penalty, and after death judgment. God would assure you that even though that is so, He does not have any pleasure at all in the death of the wicked. The death of the wicked is a most solemn thing. The life of the wicked is a terrible matter: it says elsewhere that God says He takes no pleasure in wickedness (see Ps. 5: 4); but think of the death of the wicked. It would involve that they are going into a lost eternity. There is a finality about that. There is something altogether different about the death of a saint, a believer. It speaks about the death of the righteous in scripture. One wicked man in scripture, Balaam, looked at the saints of God, and said he wanted to die the death of the righteous: “Let my soul die the death of the righteous, and let my end be like his”, Num 23: 10. But he died the death of the wicked, and God had no pleasure in that. You see an immense difference in the death of a believer, for “Precious in the sight of Jehovah is the death of his saints”, Ps 116: 15. Think of that wonderful thing, God taking a person who belongs to Him. A believer falls asleep in Jesus, and divine pleasure enters into that. A life has been secured for God, and his pathway has no doubt been reviewed, and that person is taken as pleasurable. Not so the wicked. But God has no pleasure in the death of the wicked. It gives Him no satisfaction nor pleasure at all He says, but that the wicked should turn from his way, that he may live. So these are solemn things. The gospel is a solemn matter, a matter that can make an enormous difference to you. Nothing can make more of a difference to you than the gospel. You might think of many things that can happen in your life, and many decisions that you might make, many moves you might make, many committals you might make, but nothing has a greater effect on you, for time and for eternity, than the glad tidings, one way or the other. Receive the glad tidings, come into the pathway of faith and blessing and the knowledge of God. And if it so happens that you die, then you die the death of the righteous, you go to be with Christ, and God has pleasure in it. But if you reject the gospel, you go on in sin. You cannot get clear of your sins without the gospel. You cannot proceed then into divine blessing without the glad tidings. And what a death that is, and what a thought, the death of the wicked. God has no pleasure in that.
What I have in mind is that you might understand something about what God does find pleasure in. What do you find pleasure in? I suppose we would all have to say that we have thought about pleasure generally in regard to ourselves. It is very remarkable in God’s sight what a sinner finds pleasure in. Heaven would wonder at it that men should find pleasure in the things they find pleasure in, for as sinners we find pleasure in sin. Have you ever thought about that? People actually find pleasure in things that are displeasing to God, in sin. The fact that it is a temporary pleasure, as the scripture says, does not seem to deter us in our natural state from going on in sin. There is a pleasure, but it is temporary, the pleasure of sin. In fact it says in Romans that not only do men take pleasure in sin, but they have a fellow-delight in those that commit sin (see Rom 1: 32). That is one of the things they enjoy, seeing others sinning. They would associate themselves with that pleasure. That tells us the depths of depravity of the human heart (and that is your heart and mine) and what sin has done to the human race. God had in mind of course that man should be for His pleasure, and He made man upright, it says. He did not make him a sinner, He made him upright, but he turned many devices to the ways of his own will. How disappointing to God when He went into Eden to walk with Adam and to talk with him in the cool of the day and to discover that he was hiding himself because he was a sinner. The communion there was interrupted and God found no pleasure then in Adam. God brought in certain things for Adam and Eve that speak of the death of Christ, the coats of skin, but what God had in mind was lost. Do you know that a few generations later God got what He wanted? God is always going to achieve His end. You find the seventh from Adam was one who walked with God, Enoch. Adam could not, as a sinner, banned from the garden of Eden, but you find through discipline and through God’s workings, a man appearing on the scene called Enoch, and it says of him that he walked with God. And God took him, he was so pleasing to God that He took him. He walked with God and then it says he was not, for God took him and He took him because He found pleasure in him. That is the way the saints will go. The Lord Jesus is going to come, in what we call the rapture, which we are looking for very soon, and He is going to take the saints out of the world. The living saints are not going to die, and those who die will be raised and taken at the same time. Every saint will be taken out of this scene on the very same principle as Enoch, because he is pleasing to God. God has on earth persons who are pleasing to Him, and they are so pleasing to Him there is going to come a time when He is just going to take them, all of them, all of the dead in Christ, not the sinner, not those that have died the death of the wicked, but every righteous person. All that are covered by the blood of Jesus are going to be taken. He is going to take what He has pleasure in. Are you going to go? If that happened today or tomorrow, would you go? Would you be taken as pleasurable to God? Or would you be left behind in your sins? What a solemn question that is. Well, God is looking to find pleasure in you. He found a measure of pleasure in Enoch sufficient for Him to take him, but really in the history of mankind God has not found pleasure. He has tried man in every possible way, and He has found him a great disappointment. Have you ever found yourself a very great disappointment? I have. It is an experience I think we have all got to go through, to find you are really disappointed with your self, because you cannot follow in a path that is pleasing to God in the power of the flesh. You find what sin is. However, that is another matter. It is something you have to discover, once you are a believer, how one ought to walk and please God, as it says in Thessalonians. There is a way of doing it, but you cannot do it as a sinner or an unconverted person, you have to begin with the glad tidings and then you might discover what it is to be walking and pleasing God.
Now the reason I read in Luke was because of the last two or three words we read, “good pleasure in men”. The narrative in this chapter in Luke 2 is as to the wondrous birth of Christ and the angelic announcement of it to these shepherds out there at night watching their flocks. They were honoured by this angelic appearance, and this angelic word that a Saviour had been born, “born to you”. He says as it were, ‘It is for you’. I suppose it has a meaning here as to Israel, but we can say this, the gospel is for you. The sign was in a lowly babe in swaddling clothes, and the heavenly host in remarking on it, give glory to God, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good pleasure in men”. In other words they were setting out as they looked on that babe, that what God had in mind was that God was to have glory and there was to be peace on earth and God was to find pleasure in men. You cannot, yet speak about peace on earth. One glance at the newspapers shows that peace has not come on earth yet. It would have done, but men rejected Christ. There is peace in heaven, but not yet peace on earth, until He takes up His rights. But good pleasure in men was in view. And that came into view because there appeared on this scene the Lord Jesus as One in whom God had His delight. The heavens were opened upon Him, and that was the testimony “This is my beloved Son, in whom I have found my delight”, Matt 3: 17. A blessed man appeared here who was completely pleasurable to God. There was nothing in Him that brought forth anything except divine pleasure. There had never been that before. Enoch walked and he did please God because God took him, but never like Jesus, because Jesus was perfect. A perfect blessed Man appeared here, beginning in a manger wrapped in swaddling clothes, beginning in dependence and in human weakness you might say, but the angels could see that God had in mind to bring about good pleasure in men. God has found such pleasure in Jesus that He is going to surround Himself with people like Jesus so that His pleasure will be filled out. He is going to fill out heaven with persons like Jesus. And so the life of Jesus is outlined in the gospels and worthy of your study. Luke’s gospel presents Him in the greatness and the beauteous grace of His manhood, the words of grace that came out of His mouth and the wondrous actions of the Lord Jesus, what He did and what He said. But that perfect pathway of Jesus, the inward and outward perfection of Jesus was not enough to save you or me or bring us into the pleasure of God. Jesus was entirely pleasurable to God. It was not just that outwardly He conformed or did what was right, but inwardly, in His heart, in the outgoings of His blessed spirit, of His thoughts and soul, everything was pleasurable to God. Think of God looking down and seeing that. Morning by morning and day by day, all the time He saw nothing but what was pleasing to Him. There was a fragrance to God in that. There was something wonderful for God in that life of Jesus. The life of Jesus stands as unique, that life in the days of His flesh. Never was anything like that, but by itself it would not bring you or me into blessing. It required His death that we should come into blessing. That precious life had to be given up, delightful as it was to God, and rejoiced in by Christ Himself. “Take me not away in the midst of my days” (Ps. 102: 24), He was conscious of having to give up a life that He enjoyed, because He was in communion with God always. He suffered here as a man of sorrows, rejected and hated and contradicted, and He suffered because of what He saw in sin around, but all the time He was sustained in wondrous communion with God. But if you and I were to come into the good pleasure in men, if we were to become those in whom God had pleasure, it necessitated the death of the Lord Jesus.
That is why we read in Hebrews because it brings in the Lord Jesus as establishing the pleasure of God in you and me. It is not something transient. What this passage brings out is that the old system of sacrifices for sin did not please God. You might find that a surprising statement because He, God, set it up. He set up a wonderful system of worship and of approach to Himself among His people, selecting Israel, redeeming them from Egypt and giving them blessed light and reassurance as to His concern and love. He gave them the law, their inheritance. There was a system of things in which they could have an ordered life surrounding the tabernacle where God was and where they could approach God, and serve Him and bring their sacrifices of various kinds. It mentions in this section burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin. Yet when we come to the New Testament we find that God did not really find pleasure in sacrifices. He ordered them, and they were conformed to by Israel to a certain extent at any rate, yet that was not what God had in mind at all, because the blood of bulls and goats could not take away sins. God had set up a system where there was a foreshadowing of what was going to come in. And what was going to come in was One whose blood is capable of taking away sins, a sacrifice much more excellent. All these sacrifices, every one of them, pointed to Christ. Scripture is full of Christ, full of pointers to Christ, sometimes shadowy, sometimes definite and clear. Even those Old Testament scriptures that some would say are dry and difficult to read through, when your eyes are opened you see Jesus in them. You discover that the Holy Spirit has filled the Scriptures with tributes to Jesus and with teachings about Jesus. God thinks so much of Christ, that He would fill the whole book, His whole word with Christ, and He would fill your heart with Christ. He is going to fill the world with Christ, and with those that are like Him. He is going to do that because that is His pleasure, the good pleasure of His will. What I am speaking about is coming about, and no power in heaven or earth can stop it, not all the power of Satan and his legions. God is bringing about a universe of glory for His own pleasure and it is going to be filled with persons who know Christ and are like Christ. That is what God has in mind, “good pleasure in men”. He is going to fill a new heaven and a new earth, where there is not going to be anything out of accord with Christ. God is going to do that, for it is His will, the mighty and blessed will of God. Then the question is whether we come into it. Oh come into it, be exercised, be desirous to come into this, to find the way into this. Find the way to become among those that are pleasurable to God and are going to be so eternally.
And so as to these systems of offerings, it says here, “Sacrifice and offering thou willedst not”. This is Christ speaking prophetically in Psalm 40 as coming into the world. It was not really sacrifices and offerings that God wanted, but instead it says, “thou hast prepared me a body”. Where everything else fails, Christ comes in. God brought in His people Israel, and they failed, and went away into idolatry. Then Christ came in, and He was the true vine. What God did not find in Israel, He found in Christ. And all these sacrifices that were not capable of taking away sins, God would take them away because Christ would fill out what God really had in mind, that is in His body here, in manhood, He was able to do the will of God, and to suffer too, because verse 10 involves the offering of the body of Jesus once for all. Look at these offerings, burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin. The burnt offering represents very much what I am speaking about, God’s entire delight in Jesus, because the whole of the burnt offering was offered. In some offerings only part of the animal was offered. In the burnt offering, all was offered, except the skin which the priest kept. I suppose it would remind him of the perfection of the victim that had been slain. The burnt offering is what was delightful to God. It was cut into pieces. The priest did that, and laid them in order on the altar. That is to help us to understand a little the perfection of Jesus, you might say, piece by piece. The inwards were washed with water, to bring the type up into the perfection, or to bring the type a little nearer to the perfection, of what was in Jesus. It was a burnt offering of fragrance to God, and it was for man’s acceptance. It was Christ in His acceptability. What that foreshadowed was the entire acceptability to God of the Lord Jesus. But also He came in to fill the type of the sin offering. The sin offering was not all offered to God. Certain parts were, the fat and so on, and the blood were taken into the tabernacle and placed there before God to point to the efficacy of the death of the victim, the death of Jesus. That blood availed before God. The body was taken outside the camp and burned, consumed entirely, speaking of the awful wrath of God against sin that Jesus had to bear on Calvary.
And so Jesus has filled out all these matters. All these precious things that are displayed in the Old Testament, Christ has filled them out in reality. The first is taken away that the second may be established. The old system of offerings is taken away, and instead we have this wonderful living system that now exists through the Lord Jesus’ death. And it says as to believers, in verse 10, “by which will we have been sanctified by the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all”. Believers are sanctified by the death of Jesus: not only are their sins taken away and covered by the death of Jesus but they themselves are secured for God, for His pleasure, set apart from everything that is set against God’s pleasure. That is another thing, I would mention simply, that you may be a believer but if you are tangled up in things that God hates, you are diminishing God’s pleasure in you. God’s pleasure is fully secured in persons that are clear of all that is against God and all that is wicked in this world. Sanctification would involve that. The second to last verse of the chapter indicates that the way into this is by faith: “the just shall live by faith” (v.38). It is addressed to believers, because some of these Hebrews were doubtful kinds of persons and might have been in danger of giving up Christianity. “The just shall live by faith”. Oh, to be among the just. “If he draw back, my soul does not take pleasure in him” (v.38) is a negative statement. God has no pleasure in someone drawing back from Christianity. God has pleasure in the just, those persons who are in the pathway of faith. As in that pathway of faith we can be found as those that walk and please God. And God has provided for us. He has provided completely in the gospel for our blessing and salvation, and I might say completely for His own pleasure, because these two things coincide. Our complete deliverance from sin, our salvation and blessing coincide with God’s pleasure being secured in us. Our utmost happiness and blessing exists in this, that we become pleasurable to God.
If you read the epistle to the Romans you can see that there is nothing that God has not thought about, no condition of soul, no part of your life that the gospel does not meet. And one of the great provisions that you will discover in Romans that God has given to us so that we might become pleasurable to Him, is the Holy Spirit. Believers sanctified by the death of Christ are able to receive the Holy Spirit. How could an unsanctified person receive from God the gift of His Holy Spirit? But as cleansed from our sins, we can receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. That is a great matter in your life when you receive the Holy Spirit. It is a wonderful time when you receive Christ and you come on to sure ground as knowing you have faith in the work of Christ and in the person of Christ and you are sanctified through the blood of Jesus, but then there is also this other wonderful matter. Romans 5 speaks of, “the Holy Spirit which has been given to us” (v.5). The Holy Spirit springs up into eternal life in your soul, so that you find that instead of your corrupt desires that lead you in the way of the pleasures of sin, there is another power in you that strengthens every right desire in your soul, and moves upwards. In what we are according to the flesh and as sinners, there is a downward trend in our emotions and in our feelings. In all the lusts and all the things that pour out of man, there is a downward movement. You can see it in the world, the debasement of man. Even the most sophisticated and even the most intelligent and educated men, have most debased minds. Men’s entertainment and all that kind of thing, it all goes down, but the believer has the Holy Spirit and there is something in him going up, moving towards God, the power of the Holy Spirit springing up into eternal life. And in the power of that Holy Spirit, you can walk and please God. The Holy Spirit would give you power, fresh spiritual desires, to help you in your link with Christ. Indeed, He would be your link with Christ, and help you so that you might become pleasurable.
Well this is what God is doing. As I said, nothing is going to stop Him. The only question in the preaching is whether I am in it. It is already happening. The Lord Jesus is seeing to it. Not only has He provided the basis for this being secured but He is now in charge of it. You know that God has put Christ in charge of things. We sang in our hymn:
God has given all to Jesus,
All shall prosper in His hand (Hymn 219)
That alludes to Isaiah 53 verse 10. Christ has provided in His life and in His death for the basis of God’s pleasure to be secured, and now He is administering that; “the pleasure of Jehovah shall prosper in his hand”, Isa. 53: 10. He gives persons the Holy Spirit, He deals with us, leads us on in our souls, so that the pleasure of God might be established in us. The Lord Jesus does wonderful things, far more than we could ever put into one preaching, but one of the things He does is He secures our hearts so deeply and feelingly, that we want to have part in the service of God, in praising God. That is going on at the present time and it is in the hands of Jesus. Well, these were the thoughts and it is a question then as to how we come into it. But the door is open, the way is clear, the question on our part is exercise and desire and acceptance of the glad tidings. For His Name’s sake.
GLASGOW
October 2002