WHO IS LIKE GOD?
I would like to be able to convey some impression of the kindness of God. We have a reference to it in Ephesians 2: 4-7, where it says that “God, being rich in mercy, because of his great love wherewith he loved us, (we too being dead in offences,) has quickened us with the Christ, (ye are saved by grace,) and has raised us up together, and has made us sit down together in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus, that he might display in the coming ages the surpassing riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus”. He will display the surpassing riches of His grace, and He will display them in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. That links with the history of Mephibosheth. David was anxious to find someone of the house of Saul that he might show the kindness of God to him. He wanted to give expression to the kindness of God. I wonder if every one here has that impression of God, that He is marked by kindness. You may think of God in His almightiness; sometimes He thunders, and the more He thunders the more it terrifies people, but God wants to be known in His kindness. He is to be known in other ways; it says in Romans, “Behold then the goodness and severity of God”, Rom 11: 22. There is such a thing as the severity of God. There is also such a thing as His kindness and His mercy for He is “rich in mercy”, and He displays “the surpassing riches of his grace”; such wonderful expressions we have about God in the epistle to the Ephesians! It speaks of His “great love wherewith he loved”, and also of “the surpassing greatness of his power ... in raising him [Jesus] from among the dead”. What can you or I do in the presence of death? The greatest men in the history of the world have had to succumb to death. Not one of us is equal to death. But then God is to be known, and the surpassing greatness of His power, already shown in the way He has raised up Jesus from the dead, is also to be known, and He is going to raise up from the dead all those who have put their trust in Him, and all those who may yet put their trust in Him, if they are left here a little longer. It is an ‘if’ of course; no one here knows how much longer he is going to be left here. We have cases arising amongst ourselves of sudden death, and that reminds us that you cannot be sure of your life, you cannot be sure that you are going to live till tomorrow, as it says in the book of Proverbs, “Boast not thyself of to-morrow, for thou knowest not what a day will bring forth”, chap 27: 1. So God would impress upon us the need for facing things today, as it says in the scripture, “To-day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts”, Heb 3: 7, 8. What a word that is, it is addressed to all of us; it says, “even as says the Holy Spirit”. If there is anybody here who is not converted, who is still in his sins, it is of the utmost importance that you should hear this word today, and not harden your heart, because it is open to you to repent, to believe the gospel, to receive forgiveness of sins in the Name of the Lord Jesus, and to receive with it the gift of the Holy Spirit by which you are sealed to all eternity. On the other hand, there might be a believer here who in some way or other is marked by a certain hardness of heart, a certain stubbornness, a certain retention of his own will in something that his conscience bears witness to him is not right. If there should be one here like that, a real believer sealed with the Holy Spirit, and yet marked by stubborn self-will, the Lord would give you the word; “To-day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts”. Whether it is the hard heart, the heart of insubjection, of self-will or pride, whatever it may be, whatever form it may take, whatever connection it may appear in, the word of God is ready to meet every condition of soul; it is amongst us, or in any company in which the word is spoken. So we have to be prepared for that. The preacher does not know beforehand much of what he is going to say, he has to preach dependently, recognising that the Spirit is here; because, if he is dependent, he will be available to the Spirit, and it says that the gospel is preached by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. A preacher is very responsible and has to be exercised himself, subject and dependent, so that he may not hinder the operations of the Spirit, because the Spirit needs a vessel; He can speak to the conscience of a person direct, but normally the Spirit’s service to men is carried on through fellow-men; that is part of what we call the mediatorial system. When we are young we hear the terms used and we do not know what they mean; we often hear the expression, ‘the mediatorial system’, and I daresay many do not quite understand what it means.
The passage in Timothy that we have read will help us as to that. It says, “God is one, and the mediator of God and men one”; that is to say, you and I cannot exactly have to do with God directly, for God is God and man is man; man is just a creature, infinitely less than God and far from Him by nature. But God wants to make Himself known to us, and therefore He comes out in a Mediator. Job expressed the feeling of need of a mediator, or “an umpire”, one, he said, “who should lay his hand upon us both” (Job 9: 33), someone great enough to lay His hand on God, and at the same time to lay His hand gently and tenderly on Job, and bring God and Job together. That is the idea of a mediator, one who can do that. Well now, there is one mediator of God and men, “the man Christ Jesus”. What a Mediator He is! You know the truth, of course, of the Person of Christ; you know, of course, that in His Person He “is over all, God blessed for ever”, Rom 9: 5. As you read Hebrews 1, which mentions God speaking to us in His Son, it goes on to say, “by whom also he made the worlds”, and then that He upholds “all things by the word of his power”, vv 2, 3. So we are impressed with the glory of the Son of God, that God made the worlds by Him, and that everything is being upheld by Him at the present time, “by the word of his power”. Think of the glory of the Son of God! Yet He is the One who is the Mediator. It says, “The mediator of God and men one, the man Christ Jesus”, and then how He is commended to us, “who gave himself a ransom for all”. Where should we be without the Mediator? What hope would there be for any one of us if it were not for the Mediator? He, so to speak, commends Himself to our attention, to our affection, too, by the fact that He gave Himself a ransom for all. There was the penalty of death and of judgment to come lying on every one of us, and the Lord Jesus came in and undertook to meet the whole question of the judgment that lay upon us, the whole question of the sinful state in which you and I were, to meet the whole question of the penalty of death. Thank God He has done it! What a wonderful thing that we have such a Mediator, One who has come in to make God known to us, and to commend Him to us, that He should become the object of our confidence, our trust, and our affection. That is what God has done. He desires that He should be thus known. It says here in this passage we read in Timothy, “Our Saviour God, who desires that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth”. Do we really believe it? I challenge myself sometimes as to whether I really believe that God desires that all men should be saved; He has no other desire than that, and with that in view He has lengthened this period of His long-suffering grace, and He sees that the gospel goes out in a world-wide way. I believe the Scriptures are available in almost every known language of the earth, a witness to the fact that God desires that all men should be saved, that the Scriptures which carry the truth of God to men are available to them in every known tongue amongst men. What wonderful grace! But apart from that, we have the witness in creation of the impartial goodness of God, too. It says, “He makes his sun rise on evil and good”, Matt 5: 45. Have you ever thought, as you see the sun rise, that it is a fresh testimony to you of the impartial goodness of God, causing His sun to rise on evil and good? Then the rain comes, and perhaps someone complains, perhaps some housewife complains because it is washing-day, but the rain comes, and it says, He “sends rain on just and unjust”. Do we think of these things? We cannot expect God to alter His own wise arrangements to conform to our will. We may rest assured that God knows best, when to give us the sunshine and when to give us the rain, and when to give us cloudy days, too. God knows best how to arrange these things, and therefore it is a good thing to connect everything with God. So it says, He “desires that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth”.
Then we get this wonderful verse as to “the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all, the testimony to be rendered in its own times”. What a commendation of God that is, that He is known to us in One, a Mediator who has given Himself a ransom for all! Let us make no mistake about it. It was not a costless matter; it was not costless to Christ; it was not costless to God, when Christ gave Himself a ransom for all. It meant that all that was due to all men in the way of judgment of sin and sins, and then the penalty of death, had to be taken up by Christ and borne and fully exhausted. It was not done in a moment, for we read of three hours of darkness; we may think that is not a very long period. But it is a long period. A thousand years in the sight of God are as one day, and one day as a thousand years. Our reckoning does not conform necessarily to God’s reckoning, but there were three hours of darkness when Christ was absolutely forsaken because He was made sin, 2 Cor 5: 21. “Him who knew not sin”—notice that; not simply, ‘He knew no sin’—but “knew not sin”; it is a most absolute statement. There was absolutely nothing in common, no affinity whatever between Christ and sin, “Him who knew not sin he has made sin for us”. What would that mean to the holy feelings and sensitive heart of Christ to be made sin? That thing sin, so terrible, so detestable, so horrible to the divine nature that the Lord should be absolutely personally identified with it to be made sin. You remember that under the law of Israel a leper had to keep himself apart from all men, no one was supposed to come near to a leper or to touch him. But a leper came to Jesus and falling down before Him said, “Lord, if thou wilt, thou art able to cleanse me” (Matt 8: 2, 3); and the answer of the Lord was, “I will; be cleansed”; and He put forth His hand and handled him. He touched him freely, not just a mere touch, but touched him freely. It was to convey to that poor leper that the Son of God was prepared to identify Himself without reserve with the condition of leprosy that was in that man, typical of sin; to identify Himself with it absolutely in order that the man might be cleansed. That is what Jesus has done on the cross when He was made sin, and then the judgment of God against sin was poured out on His head, and, thank God, it was exhausted. No one else in the universe could possibly have borne it, but He has borne it and exhausted it. Then there was the penalty of death, and the Lord Jesus went into death. He did not just die and rise again at once; three days and three nights He lay there; the three hours of darkness witnessing to the complete dealing with sin according to the majesty of God; and then three days and three nights in the grave, in the heart of the earth, in order to witness to the fact that this matter of death was fully dealt with. That is what has been done by our Lord Jesus Christ, and in doing that He has brought to light what God is, for He is the Mediator of God and men. What He has done, of course, attaches our hearts to Him personally, but it is also the commendation of God to us; we know God in that light, “our Saviour God”, as it is said in 1 Timothy 2.
I now refer to that passage in Titus, because it brings in the kindness of God, and that is a thought we get also in the passage I have read in 2 Samuel. It says, “When the kindness and love to man of our Saviour God appeared, not on the principle of works which have been done in righteousness which i had done”, so that salvation by works is entirely set aside. Justification is by faith, as we know; we know how Luther stood for it centuries ago, justification on the principle of faith and not of works. That stands, and makes way for God’s mercy, “according to his own mercy ... which he poured out on us richly”, there was no stint, no reserve, no hesitation; and “that having been justified by his grace, we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life”. So there is the rich pouring out of the Spirit. You remember how Peter on the day of Pentecost spoke of Jesus the Nazaræan, and said, “Having therefore been exalted by the right hand of God, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this which ye behold and hear” (Acts 2: 33), and so “God gives not the Spirit by measure”, John 3: 34. He gives it to us in an unstinted way, in order that we may get an impression of the unreserved way in which God comes out in blessing to men.
Now I refer briefly to this history of Mephibosheth, a well-known and most interesting story. David said, “Is there yet any that is left of the house of Saul, that I may shew him kindness for Jonathan’s sake?” Saul was the greatest man of his time, head and shoulders above every man in Israel, and God picked him out; he represents man at his best, and God helped him greatly so far. But then God always had David in mind; David is a type of Jesus as beloved by God on account of what He is; the very name ‘David’ means beloved, and David was God’s beloved on account of what he was, man after God’s own heart, as it says, “I have found David, the son of Jesse, a man after my heart, who shall do all my will”, Acts 13: 22. Saul did not fulfil all God’s will by a long way, although he had every advantage, and stood head and shoulders above all the rest in Israel; yet, alas, he went from bad to worse, and in the end he finishes up with enquiring of a woman who had a spirit of Python—a terrible thing for a man so favoured of God. We do not know, we leave with God, the matter of how he stands for eternity; it is not our matter. But he is just picked out in that way as an illustration, an example, of man after the flesh, with every advantage. Now in contrast with that, God brings forward David, and the first mention of him is that he was feeding the sheep; that is the kind of man that God delights in, because feeding sheep is a self-denying matter, it involves a good deal of sacrifice to look after sheep, to see that they are properly fed, to see that if they stray someone goes after them, to bring them back, and to bind up their wounds, if necessary. If you read Ezekiel 34 you will find out what is involved in keeping sheep, in being a shepherd. So that is how David is presented, and so is a type of Him who is the great Shepherd and the good Shepherd. We know who the good Shepherd is, “I know those that are mine, and am known of those that are mine, as the Father knows me and I know the Father”, John 10: 14, 15. What wonderful intimacy the Lord describes between His sheep and Himself! Do we seek to cultivate intimate links with Christ? There is every encouragement to do so. Not that one would set oneself forward as an example of it; I am sure there is very much more that one could have done, than one has done hitherto. But still there it is, the Lord says, “I am the good shepherd; and I know those that are mine, and am known of those that are mine, as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep”. That is His commendation, if I may say so reverently, and that is what attaches us to Christ, “I lay down my life for the sheep”. Now He would have His own take on a similar character. Paul certainly laid down his life for the brethren, and John says, “Hereby we have known love, because he has laid down his life for us; and we ought for the brethren to lay down our lives” (1 John 3: 16), not in the way of actual physical death necessarily, not to be a martyr in the sense of physical death. It is to be a daily matter with us; are the saints in your heart? Are you prepared to lay down your life for them? Are you prepared to labour for them in whatever way may be open, and to serve them unstintingly? That is what the Lord loves to see; that is what God loves to see. Thus we have the good Shepherd, and then we have the great Shepherd, in Hebrews 13, the great Shepherd who has been raised from amongst the dead.
The Lord presents Himself to us in this wondrous light, so one has just been led to speak of David, who was a great shepherd. He had his secret history with God. There came a time in David’s history, when he was only a youth; he was keeping his father’s sheep, and there came a lion and a bear and took a lamb out of the flock, but David went after them. Think of a youth doing that! I do not know that I would be prepared to go after a lion or a bear; but David went after the lion and the bear; it speaks of them as though it was just one animal. It is really a type of the world; a lion will intimidate people, there is something terrible about the roar of a lion; it is possible for us to be intimidated by the world, and give in to it, even as Christians. We ought not to; we do not want to give in to the world just because it has an intimidating attitude! Then what does the bear do? The bear does not intimidate, he embraces you in his arms, but as he does it he would squeeze all the life out of you! That is what friendship with the world will do, it will squeeze all the life out of you! If you allow yourself to be taken in by the world and be friendly with it, you will find that all your spiritual life gets gradually squeezed out of you. So we want to be careful of the lion and the bear. David met them both, a wonderful type of Christ, the One who could really meet Satan, in whatever forms he would attack us, in order to save His people.
So we find that David is chosen by God to displace and replace Saul, and David becomes king, then he asks, if there is any left of the house of Saul that he “may shew him kindness for Jonathan’s sake”, and then he says to Ziba, “Is there not yet any of the house of Saul, that I may shew the kindness of God to him?” What a standard David has before his mind, “the kindness of God”! That is what we read of in Ephesians 2: 7, “in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus”; what kindness it is! Have you ever thought of the way God has acted towards us? Not only in forgiving us our sins, or giving us the Holy Spirit, but raising us up together, and making us to sit down together in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus. This is not some theory; it is a reality, that in the grace of God we are made to sit down restfully in the presence of God as suitable to Him, as there before Him, in Christ Jesus. Do we realise the greatness of it? It is the kindness of God, His “kindness towards us in Christ Jesus”. So we read that David said, ‘I would like to show this kindness to someone of the house of Saul. Is there not yet any?’ “And Ziba said to the king, Jonathan has yet a son, who is lame on his feet ... Behold, he is in the house of Machir the son of Ammiel, in Lodebar”. I understand Lodebar means ‘the place of no bread’, a place of spiritual starvation. Is there anybody here in a place of no bread? Alas, there are saints of God who go on in associations in which there is no spiritual food for them. If there is anybody like that here, I say there is no reason why you should continue to go on like that; the Lord has an area here where there is bread, where there is real spiritual food, and if you want to find it, you have only to seek Him and He will most certainly direct you to it. Ziba says, “Jonathan has yet a son, who is lame on his feet”, as though to say, there is not much to commend him, he cannot walk properly. But that does not matter, that is no hindrance to David, he only wants someone of Saul’s generation to whom he may show the kindness of God. So it says, “King David sent, and fetched him out of the house of Machir the son of Ammiel, from Lodebar”. If there is anyone here linked up with any organisation, or system, or connection of any kind, which is marked by the absence of spiritual food, I say to you that the Lord would fetch you out of it, He certainly would! He has an area where there is spiritual food, and He certainly would fetch into that area anyone here who feels the lack of spiritual food. Now Mephibosheth “came to David, and fell on his face and did obeisance. And David said, Mephibosheth. And he said, Behold thy servant!” The Lord is the good Shepherd, He calls His sheep by name, and David says here, “Mephibosheth”; he wants to establish personal links with him. The Lord calls His own sheep by name. This comes in in John 10 in connection with being in the fold, and being led out of it, in order to find your place in the flock. That is what the Lord wants for every one of His saints. He does not want you hindered by some organisation, some organised religion, just like a fold, He does not want that, He wants you to come out into real liberty, He can lead you “in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake” (Ps 23: 3), and lead you in liberty too! He would lead out His sheep, calling them by name. After those early verses in John 10, you get no more about calling His sheep by name; He calls them by name just to lead them out of what is a hindrance to them, what is inimical to the real features of the flock of God; He wants you to find your place in the flock; He will call you by name out of all that is organised by men, in order that you may find yourself in the liberty which the recognition of the Spirit provides for those who obey Him. “And David said to him, Fear not; for I will certainly shew thee kindness for Jonathan thy father’s sake, and will restore thee all the land of Saul thy father; and thou shalt eat bread at my table continually. And he bowed himself, and said, What is thy servant, that thou shouldest look upon such a dead dog as I am?” He comes to a sense of his own worthlessness in the presence of divine grace. It is a good thing to come to that, a sense of your own nothingness and worthlessness. Mr Darby says in hymn 87—
O keep us, Love divine, near Thee,
That we our nothingness may know,
And ever to Thy glory be
Walking in faith while here below.
It is not easy to come to! We may profess to be nothing, and yet all the time in our own thoughts, we are something. But that is the great thing to come to, a sense that we are nothing and Christ is everything. If Christ is everything that is all we really need.
Now I want to touch on the end of the chapter. David takes Mephibosheth, and he sets him down at his table, that he may eat there as one of the king’s sons, as it says in verse 11. That is exactly where we stand, that is what we realised this morning, that we were there sitting down restfully in the Father’s presence as His sons. He has sons innumerable, I think we may say, but it is a great thing to be amongst them. Yet there is this thought that you are not lost in the crowd; no father, however big his family, forgets the names of his children; every son has his own status, his own personal importance, his own name indeed, and his own personality, too. There is the idea of the assembly united to Christ, a corporate idea, the assembly moving under the hand of Christ in response to God; that is a very great divine conception. But then the assembly is composed of persons, and every one of those persons is a son, do not forget that. There is the side of what is corporate, a corporate response to God in the assembly, moving under the impulse of Christ. But there is also the side of the personal affection entering into the response of sons, and each son having his own place of distinction in the Father’s affections. We are brought into a most wonderful place!
Now it says, “Mephibosheth had a young son, whose name was Mica”. What does Mica mean? ‘Who is like God?’ That is what we might well say after every experience of being in the presence of God, consciously at home and restful there, suited to His presence alongside of Christ; we can well say, ‘Who is like God?’ Who else would ever have acted in that way? Who would go to the lengths He has gone, in Christ, who went right down under the judgment and into death and then rose again, imparting His own life as a Man, as Jesus has done, to all that the Father has given Him? The more you think of these things, the more wonderful they become! Think of one of the Persons of the Godhead deciding to become Man and to retain manhood eternally, not that that detracts from His personal glory, for it does not, He is “over all, God blessed for ever”, Rom 9: 5. He has become Man, and remains Man eternally, in order that, redemption having been accomplished, He might give us life in Himself as a Man, that we might partake by the Holy Spirit in His own life in manhood. That is where we are set up before God, in true manhood according to Christ, in all the liberty and joy of sonship. Now having reached that point in actual experience, we might well say, ‘Who is like God?’ The thought of these things, the experience of them, the joy of them, is intended to promote a spirit of worship Godward in our hearts. It is just worshippers that God wants. It is not worship exactly that He wants; Scripture does not say that, it says that what the Father is seeking is worshippers (see John 4: 23); it is persons imbued with the spirit of worship that the Father takes pleasure in. So Mica is the son of Mephibosheth. Everywhere Mica went people would ask his name, and he would say, ‘My name is Mica, Who is like God?’ Everywhere Mica went, he would be raising that question in the consciences and hearts of men: ‘Who is like God?’ Do you know God? That is what Mica would mean. That is what the prophet Micah is, a distinct Micah, but the same name. You will find, if you turn to his prophecy, that he ends his book on that note, ‘Who is a God like unto thee?’ (Micah 7: 18). So we are to have that impression as we go over the gospel, and prove the power of it in our own experience, that it is not a question simply of the peace and joy and blessing that belong to believers, but the great thing is that we have been brought to know God, so that from our hearts we say, ‘Who is like God?’. That is really the basis of worship, and God wants worshippers; there is no reason why every one of us in this room should not be a worshipper of God.
May God grant it may be so for His Name’s sake!
BEXLEY
26th August 1966
From The Word Proclaimed, 1968
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