THE TRIUMPH OF GRACE

C. J. H. Davidson

Daniel 5: 20, 22, 30; 1 Corinthians 15: 3, 4, 16, 17, 20, 21, 54

I have been impressed, beloved friends, recently by three burials. One in Moscow, a great leader, and no mention of God in it; they said the ceremony took place. What ceremony? A godless one. I would not want to have been there. Another was the burial of a beloved brother, and I was there and shared in the carrying of his body to the grave. And I tell you, friend, there was no power of Christ’s resurrection in Moscow, but there was in Weston-super-Mare; the power and glory of resurrection. Not that there will not be resurrection in Moscow, there will. The third burial, again at which I was not present, has a bearing on you young people here, lest you should say, ‘I have got my life before me’. You might say to me,

‘You are an old man preaching’. That may be, but I will tell you something, friend, the sky, outside there, and not the grave, is my goal. But the third burial was of a lad of twenty-one; sudden death in an accident; his car turned over and he was killed. As far as I know he died trusting in Christ. So, let not any of you younger ones say, ‘This could not happen to me’, because it happened to him; it was on a Lord’s day evening only a few weeks back.

Scripture never records that Belshazzar was buried; he died the same night that the prophet spoke to him. As was the custom in the Old Testament, Nebuchadnezzar was called his father; actually he was his grandfather, but Belshazzar had known the conversion of the greatest potentate of that time, one who had never bowed to anyone; they all bowed to him, and if he wanted a man removed he could execute him—“whom he would he slew, and whom he would he kept alive” (Daniel 5: 19). But one day (Oh, the magnificence of it!) God humbled him and reached him. If there is anybody here to be humbled and reached, I pray God will do it tonight because I cannot—none can give a ransom for his brother, nor by any means redeem him (see Psalm 49: 7), but I know the power of the Holy Spirit at work in a meeting like this in consciences because, I will tell you this, you are all in the position of Belshazzar. You know that persons have got converted and gone, even in death, triumphantly into the presence of their Saviour. You know all this.

Then Daniel says, “and the God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways”; that applied to that man in Moscow, a leader of millions of Russians, that God had given him his breath at his birth, and God took it from him at his death. The Scripture says there is no discharge in that war, none can retain the spirit in the day of death. And what is so solemn is that that man is not unconscious, he is fully conscious at this moment. The poet says, and it is naked error, ‘Death is a sleep and a forgetting’; it is neither! Even the wicked dead all live to God. In Luke 16 the Lord

portrays the consciousness of a dead man. He had a burial, but he had taken no notice in his lifetime of the God in whose hand his breath was and whose were all his ways, and who sees and knows.

You say, ‘This does not sound much like the gospel’. Well, the gospel had reached the family of Nebuchadnezzar. God looked down the ages when He humbled that great king; God looked down the ages to see the cross of Christ and the shed blood, and I tell you, my friends, we shall see Nebuchadnezzar in glory. He wrote, or said, one of the most magnificent paeans of praise in Scripture—“Now I Nebuchadnezzar praise and extol and honour the King of the heavens”, Daniel 4: 37. Oh how low he had come and how great God was! and his grandson knew that. Belshazzar was regent for his father; history tells us that the father was mentally affected and Belshazzar reigned in his stead. Nevertheless, he knew not only his father’s pitiable condition, but his grandfather’s magnificent conversion, and so, in disobedience and total disregard of God, he defiled God’s vessels of the temple in Jerusalem, and that very night the man’s hand came out and wrote on the wall (Daniel 5: 5). You have heard the story, some of you younger ones; I heard it from my father sitting on his knee as a little boy, and the gravity of it is with me yet. The prophet pronounces what the charge was—there is no suspended sentence with God. He is very long-suffering and patient, but when the time comes the penalty is clear; Belshazzar is even now waiting to be raised.

What can I say to you? You not only know the story of Belshazzar and his awful end that night; you have got today to come to be safe in the arms of Jesus, you little ones, you older ones. I myself, as a boy of nine, heard Mr. Catterall preach and I came into the arms of Jesus.

You do not need to say that I have strayed since, but, you know, He has the heart of a Shepherd. He brings persons back

again. And the power of it in bringing us back is the power of resurrection. How full Paul’s gospel must have been as he preached it in Corinth, the wickedest city of the Greek world. I have often remarked that even the Greek world was shocked with what went on in Corinth—the corruption—and they coined a verb for it, Korinthiadso, to behave like a Corinthian. And the Lord looked down on that city and said to Paul, ‘I have got much people there; I will not let anyone set on you, you shall go there as My ambassador and preach the gospel’. They got a bit away from it by the time he wrote the first letter. But, Oh, the grace of this dispensation!

In Nebuchadnezzar’s time it was not a time of grace. It is marvellous that that man had grace shown him, an absolute rebel of a man; he was up against God, and God brought him down and converted him, the outstanding conversion of the Old Testament. But I am telling you that it is a time, two thousand years, of the long-suffering of God, and with Corinth it was like that. Two things Paul had to give them again that they had morally lost. One was the gospel, “I delivered to you, in the first place”, he said. In the language of Daniel, “Thou knewest all this”. In his grace Paul went over the gospel again. The second thing he gave them again was the Lord’s supper, I delivered to you, he says again, what I received, and what they did not deserve they had restored to them, the joy of the Lord’s supper, the remembrance of Christ. Were you here today? I was. I did not deserve to be here. I had it delivered to me the second time. That was just like God to overthrow the devil’s activities in the wickedest city of the Greek world by giving them the gospel all over again, and giving them the Supper all over again. What a God we have to do with! I do not know whether you feel warmed in your affections, which have perhaps got cold, but that is the kind of God we have to do with.

We have been hearing in these three days of the character of God and the excellencies of His grace. Do you know what grace is? I love Mr. Raven’s definition of it, ‘Grace is love in activity towards unworthy objects’. It will not be grace up there. We shall magnify grace eternally, but it will not be grace up there; there will be no unworthy objects in heaven. But grace is needed here where you and I have failed; it is grace that will yet have to do with Israel, and in the very place on this earth where God had to say to them, ‘Not My people’, in that very place they are going to be called, “Sons of the living God”, Hosea 1: 10. Oh, how magnificent grace is! Think of those people, the Jews, all adrift from God now, going their own way, yet to be clothed with sonship. They will not have it as you can have it. Do you know you can have sonship through faith in Christ by the Spirit as a firstborn one? They will not be like that; they will be sons, but they will not be firstborn ones. Only those of Christ’s assembly are said to be “the assembly of the firstborn who are registered in heaven”, Hebrews 12: 23. What a lot opens up to you. Are you going to go away from it? Do you know they were doubting the power of the resurrection in Corinth? Paul says to them, “How say some among you that there is not a resurrection of those that are dead?”, 1 Corinthians 15: 12. Just think for a moment of the rebels in their ungodly death with a so-called ceremony with no mention of the God they disown and the Christ they reject. The dead are raised, not only believers but unbelievers. The Lord Himself emphasized that the dead are raised.

You know, when Nebuchadnezzar was converted it was just like a dead man being brought to life and serving God in the praise that went up from his heart to the King of the heavens, and Nebuchadnezzar will see the King of the heavens corporeally, and I tell you young ones that it will be the Jesus into whose arms you can come now and be safe for eternity. It will be just that Man; the only Man bodily in heaven now in the presence of God’s angels is Christ. The departed saints are happy

“with Christ, for it is very much better”, Philippians 1: 23. They await the body of glory. But the beauty of it is that the power of life in the Spirit can come into you straight away. Have you ever come to that throne of grace, the Father’s throne of grace and Christ sitting with Him in it, and received the forgiveness of your sins? Christ died for our sins. I say ‘Amen’ to that. That is not just doctrine, that is actuality, that the blood has been shed for the atonement of my soul.

But do you only come to the throne for that? You younger ones, or any of you for that matter, have you received the gift of the Holy Spirit? You have to go to the throne for that; you can go to the throne for everything. You think of the God whose throne it is, who gives the Holy Spirit to those that ask Him. You will never have power for the true enjoyment of life down here unless you have received the gift of the Holy Spirit. You need to be sure. I do not know as I look round this room; all I can say is that I am seeking to set before you the long-suffering grace of God who is the heart-knowing God. Christ was buried; think of the Man who had given the Father supreme delight in His pathway here going out of sight, buried, but never seeing corruption. As to us, Paul says, “this corruptible must needs put on incorruptibility”. How blessed that will be!

You might say, ‘I am a little afraid of the judgment-seat of Christ and what will be raised there’. When we are there, friend, we shall have put on incorruptibility. The flesh, which is with me still, and with you, is a corrupting element if we allow it to come into expression.

There is One who helps, and that is the Spirit. Have you sung

that and meant it, ‘Holy Spirit, Helper nigh’ (Hymn 453)? You will find in Him all you need.

Are you troubled about your future, as to how you are going to find your way through this present evil world? how you are going to earn your living? how you are going to get through?

Go to the throne of grace. We have liberty of access, free, and at all times. You know, you go into the holiest when you go to the throne of grace.

We do not use the presence of God as much as we could and should, but the blessedness of it, the attractiveness of it, is that after His burial Christ was raised, according to the Scriptures.

There is only one Man out of death, risen and glorified, as yet, but there are going.to be multitudes. The first resurrection will raise believers, right back to Adam, and they will all come out, each in his own rank; the firstborn rank, that of the assembly, is the first rank.

Christ, of course, is out as the first-fruits now at this moment, a Man in glory, and we do homage to Him. We did that this morning, in this place, homage to the Son of God. He came out of death and went up in glory without one of my sins upon Him, and I have been washed in the blood of the Lamb. Is there any fear, therefore, as to the judgment-seat? The Man that I shall see at that judgment-seat is the Saviour whose precious blood redeemed me. In John Newton’s beautiful personal language—

‘Amazing grace! how sweet the sound!

That saved a wretch like me;

I once was lost, but now am found;

Was blind, but now I see’.

What do I see? By faith we see Jesus, the Man who went down into death at Calvary. Every one of the redeemed is going to bow to Him in glory; they are doing it now; but every unbeliever will bow the knee to Christ in that day. They will not be just spirits, they will be raised with a body, but alas,

as with Belshazzar, the time of God’s grace will have gone by. So it is very solemn and yet extremely powerful that the time is coming when death is going to be overthrown. Paul says,

“but thanks to God, who gives us the victory by our Lord Jesus Christ”, 1 Corinthians 15: 57.

I love to speak in closing of a remarkable happening in the Falklands war; men were on a Royal Navy ship, many of them going to their death, and there was no official chaplain, so they got a man (who was obviously converted) to write a prayer that could be used before they went into battle. The end of that prayer is magnificent; it was in the ‘Daily Telegraph’. I have not ceased to rejoice in it; these are the closing words that those men heard that went into battle, ‘Through the saving grace of our Lord Jesus Christ’. When I think of what the grace of that Saviour could do for those men who might suddenly be taken from life into death, I rejoice in the saving grace of that Man. If they responded to those words, and trusted in Him, we shall see them in glory. What an unfolding of the grace of God there is going to be in that day! May our hearts then let the power of this come into our souls. You know what Ezekiel’s resurrection scene was like; they stood up upon their feet, once only dead bones, but now men, an exceeding great army (see Ezekiel 37: 10). I would like the power of Christ’s resurrection to come into you and me tonight, for His name’s sake.

Preaching at Redbridge
2 January 1983