THE LORD AS MAN’S NEIGHBOUR
This is a very familiar scripture, but we need to remember that it was no less than Jesus who gave us this parable, Jesus the Son of God, so that all that He said, even though we are familiar with it in the letter, has very great weight and authority; it comes direct from the heart of God. It is a wonderful thing that God should address Himself to man in parables, just conveying in a parable a set of circumstances that anybody can understand, and the detail of which will appeal to all. It is to leave the impression with us that God is prepared to go to infinite lengths and self-sacrifice in order that we might be brought to Him, and be set down in His presence as eternally suitable to Him, so that we are really at home in the presence of God. Is there anybody here who is not really at home in the presence of God? Is there anybody here to whom the presence of God has an uncomfortable result, an uncomfortable effect, making you feel somewhat uneasy? Is it so? That can be easily understood from the experience of many, but God does not want any of us to remain in that condition. He wants every one of us to be perfectly at home in His presence, not that He is going to lower His standard to accommodate Himself to us, for He does not intend to do that, He never does that. What He does is that He says, ‘If you are prepared to be obedient, I am prepared to lift you up to whatever standards My holiness requires’. He is prepared to give everyone who obeys the gospel the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is one of the Persons of the Godhead. What a wonderful thing that the Lord should say, ‘If you are prepared to obey the gospel, and take your true place in repentance before God and believe what is presented to you in the glad tidings, I am prepared to ensure that you receive the Holy Spirit, not just as a visitor, but to abide with you for ever’. Think of the possibilities of having the Holy Spirit of God abiding in us for ever, and never to leave us! 2 John 1, 2 says, “the truth … abides in us and shall be with us to eternity”. That means that the Spirit of God, who is the Spirit of truth, will be dwelling in us to all eternity. That is the way God proposes to meet our need. It is a wonderful proposal, and the more you look into these simple matters of the gospel, the more wonderful and glorious they become, and it must be so, because they come from the heart of God, and He has infinite resources; He has wisdom, love and power to meet any demand made upon Him. There is not a single demand that can be made upon God that He cannot meet, and meet amply, out of the fulness that there is in His own heart.
Here we have this lawyer, and he wants to know what he shall do to inherit life eternal. The Lord says, “What is written in the law? how readest thou?” “How readest thou?—notice that, not ‘What readest thou?’ There is a good deal in that as to how we read the Scriptures. Mr James Taylor said years ago that when he read the Scriptures he liked to place himself in the presence of them and let them speak to him. So the Lord says here, “How readest thou?” This man gives a correct answer, he says, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thine understanding”; that is the first thing. Have you thought about that? Why should God command that? Can you not see that He is love? He loves. Nobody that was not love could say, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart”, and so on; it shows that God is love because He would never command love from His creatures, and the love of the creature would not be anything to Him, if He were not love Himself. But God being what He is, when He sets out what a man should be in relation to Himself, says, what he should do is to love the Lord his God with all his heart, with all his soul, with all his strength, and with all his understanding. Then there is another thing, “Thou shalt love … thy neighbour as thyself”. The Lord has certainly done that. God never asks us to do anything that He is not prepared to do Himself; you can rest assured of that. “Thy neighbour as thyself”. He was indicating that God would come out in Christ in this wonderful way of being prepared to love His neighbour as Himself. That is to say, He would give His life for him, and that is what He has done. The Lord Jesus has come in as the great neighbour of men, He has come near to us. He could have remained on high and left us alone, left us to judgment; He could have done that if He pleased. Who was to hinder Him from remaining there if He pleased? He said, ‘No, I will be a neighbour to man and draw near to him’. Have you thought of God as a neighbour to you? Perhaps you do not quite like the idea, perhaps you think if you had God quite as near to you as that, in a neighbourly way, that He would make certain demands that you are not altogether prepared to meet. I should advise you to dismiss such thoughts. God is prepared to make us perfectly at home in His presence.
There is first of all the question of our guilt; but how does God meet it? He says, ‘I will come in in Christ and meet it for you’. When He appeared to Moses, as we read in Exodus 3, He talked about the bondage that His people were in and He said, “I am come down to deliver them”. Now how are you and I to escape the bondage of sin and guilt? There are two ways: first of all by the coming in of Christ as Saviour, who bore our sins in His body on the tree, and made propitiation for sins by His death; He was actually made sin, and in that position, as made sin, bore the whole judgment of God against sin, that no drop of it should ever touch anyone who believes in Him. Wonderful grace! But then there is another thing that God has done: He has given the Holy Spirit to those who obey Him (Acts 5: 32), and He becomes the power in the soul to hold you in attachment to Christ. Do you know that Christ loved righteousness and hated lawlessness? He never did anything wrong, never committed any sin, never thought anything that ought not to be thought; wonderful the perfection you find in Jesus! But then, by the gift of the Holy Spirit, you can be held in living attachment to Christ, so that you begin to love what He loved, you begin to desire to be pleasing to the Lord day by day, and He furnishes the strength in order that that might be so. He gives you wisdom, too, to meet the exigencies that arise in the course of a day, the unexpected positions. Scripture says that Christ has been made to us wisdom from God (1 Cor 1: 30); just think of that! You cannot match the wisdom that is to be found in Christ; the wisest man on earth, the man with the greatest resources imaginable, and the power mentally to dispense them, he is nothing to be compared with the resource there is in Christ. All the fulness of the Godhead dwells in Him bodily (Col 2: 9), and He “has been made to us wisdom from God, and righteousness, and holiness, and redemption” (1 Cor 1: 30); what for? in order that “He that boasts, let him boast in the Lord”, v 31. There are great men in this world’s history; this country itself has produced certain great men, but then in the course of time, and after a very short time really, they die, and they go to the dust. Very humiliating, is it not? God reminds us that we are dust, it says that “He remembereth that we are dust”, Ps 103: 14. Very gracious of Him, for there is not much power connected with dust, and when you realise that you are dust, you are very thankful that Scripture assures us in Psalm 103, that God remembers that we are dust. He does not expect more of us than we are capable of, He remembers compassionately that we are dust. But then we are not only dust. Sometimes I hear that scripture quoted as that He remembers we are ‘but dust’, but Scripture does not say that, it says, “He remembereth that we are dust”, that is the condition we are in, but we are more than dust in the eyes of God, especially if we have obeyed the gospel. If the work of God in us appears and shows itself in obedience to the gospel, then I say we are of countless value in the sight of God, we are among those in whom Christ is shortly to be glorified. He is coming out “to be glorified in his saints, and wondered at in all that have believed” (2 Thess 1: 10), and if all here (as I expect you are) are believers in the Lord Jesus, you and I are going to have part in that, and it is not very long ahead, either! The Lord is coming for us; then after He has taken us to be with Himself, He is coming out with us, with all the saints; think of that! In one moment, in a twinkling of an eye; it is hardly believable, but it is believable because He has said it, and we know that He speaks true. But just think of that, in a moment, “in the twinkling of an eye” (1 Cor 15: 52); how long does the twinkling of an eye take? In a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, those who are living will be caught up, will be changed as to their bodily condition, changed to a condition of glory, and those who are dead will be raised and together we shall be caught up to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall be always with the Lord, 1 Thess 4: 15-18.
Now in regard to this passage this man asks the Lord who his neighbour is, and the Lord tells this remarkable parable. He says, “A certain man descended from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers, who also, having stripped him and inflicted wounds, went away leaving him in a half-dead state”. He was helpless as to himself. In a half-dead state, with wounds and stripped of all necessary raiment, of all that he had, and left in a half-dead state. That is morally just the state that each of us is in, until we receive Christ. The cleverest man on earth is in that condition morally in the sight of God, if he has not got Christ. I grieve, I mourn, for any man, however great he may be in this world in natural ability and accomplishment and all that kind of thing, if he has not got Christ he is poor indeed. So it says, “A certain priest happened to go down that way, and seeing him, passed on on the opposite side”; that was not his matter, a priest is not concerned with a halfdead man, that is the system, that is the character, that attaches to those who belong to the religious system. He could do nothing, he just passed on on the opposite side. Then it says that “a Levite came and looked at him”, there was just a little more interest on the part of the Levite than there was on the part of the priest, but he was equally helpless. But it says, “A certain Samaritan journeying”; a Samaritan, a despised person. In John 4 the Lord in grace is speaking to a woman who was a Samaritan, and the woman was astonished that He would deign to speak to her. She says, “How dost thou, being a Jew, ask to drink of me who am a Samaritan woman? for Jews have no intercourse with Samaritans”. But God has dealings with Samaritans, He has dealings with sinners. Indeed, when the Lord was here they said, “He is a friend of publicans and sinners”, and so He is, thank God. Where would you and I be if He were not? Where would you and I be if He were not the friend of sinners? Thank God that He is! It says, “A certain Samaritan journeying came to him, and seeing him, was moved with compassion, and came up to him and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine; and having put him on his own beast, took him to the inn and took care of him”. What does all that mean? It means the way that Jesus has served us, the way the Saviour has met our need, coming in and taking all upon Himself. He “bore our sins in his body on the tree”, 1 Pet 2: 24. Have you ever numbered your own sins? That would be impossible. If you could number them, multiply that by the number of people who have trusted in Christ, and what a total of sins would you get? I do not think figures could ever express it, and yet He bore those sins; it is not a theoretical matter, it is a real genuine practical matter, He bore those sins, and the judgment due to them in His own body on the tree. He came into manhood in order that He could do it. You cannot attach the thought of dying to God as such, but He who in His Person is God, and ever remains God, “over all, God blessed for ever”, it says (Rom 9: 5), He in grace was pleased to become a Man, to take manhood condition, in order that He might become the Saviour of men by taking the sins of men upon Himself, and bearing and exhausting the judgment of God against those sins. Then He went into death; what is the significance of that? If propitiation has been made for sins, what is the significance of His going into death? I think there is this significance in it, that there was a man who committed those sins. Each one of us had committed sins, and it is simply because of what we are in our nature, sinful by very nature. Would you not like to see that sinful man, that you and I had part in, disappear from God’s sight for ever? If you have been identified with him would you not be thankful to be relieved of your link with that man? Christ has died for us; He did not die for Himself, He died for us, and therefore we are entitled to appropriate that to ourselves, and say that before God we have died. We have not come into judgment because Christ has borne the judgment, and now we have died before God, because the One who took our place has died and been buried, the whole thing has gone out of sight before God for ever. Is that not wonderful news, that you need not any longer be worrying yourself about the dreadful man that you find in yourself, and the terrible thoughts you find in your heart, and all that kind of thing? You do find these things, for Christians find wicked thoughts in their hearts, and unclean thoughts in their minds; it is part of the condition we are in. You do not identify yourself with them. What you say is, “O wretched man that I am!”, or you can well say, ‘O wicked man that I am!’, because you find wicked thoughts arising in your mind and heart, and you have to dissociate yourself from them, and you are entitled to do that, because Christ has made them all His own, and has borne the judgment due to the sin and the sins, and then has died, so that before God, in the Person of our Substitute, our history has been ended in death, and put out of sight for ever in burial. Is that not wonderful good news? That is how the gospel is presented to us, “that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures; and that he was buried” (1 Cor 15: 3, 4); and that is the end of the matter so far as God is concerned. Now Jesus has been raised from among the dead, and every believer in Christ has been given life in Christ. Oh, it is a wonderful thing! You can be thankful that you are a Christian; you need not be ashamed of being a Christian. You are set up before God in Christ in the most wonderful nearness and access to Him.
In the parable in Luke 15, when the younger son came back who had been in the far country where he had wasted his substance with riotous living, he came to the father’s house, and his father saw him a long way off, and he had compassion “and ran, and fell upon his neck, and covered him with kisses”, v 20. This is not just a fairy tale, this is the actual expression in the words of the Lord Jesus of what is in the heart of God, what His attitude is toward a repenting sinner. He “fell upon his neck, and covered him with kisses”. So he is brought into the house. The father said, “Bring out the best robe”; in fact I think he was clothed with the best robe before he came into the house, because the father said, “Bring out the best robe and clothe him in it, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet”. Think of the difference, think of what he was only a little while before in the far country, hungry, not having had proper food for a long time, for he had lived on the husks that the swine did eat. Then he is brought into the house, with the best robe, a ring on his hand, and sandals on his feet, so that instead of being a beggar he is a son. He is set up in the liberty of a son; that is what sandals on the feet mean; and then they bring out the fatted calf. I only want to give an impression of the wonderful richness, the unlimited blessing, that is in the heart of God for a repenting sinner. It is not only in the heart of God Himself, but it says, “there is joy before the angels of God for one repenting sinner”, v 10. All heaven is agog with joy when someone repents; just think of that! Think of what is possible to us. Perhaps someone here, some believer here, has done something that his or her conscience witnesses as wrong, and a little pride and selfwill on your part is hindering you from confessing it to God, and maybe it needs confession to somebody else as well. You are just being hindered by a little pride and self-will, and if you will only let that go, just acknowledge the truth before God, and to anybody else to whom it should be acknowledged, just acknowledge it, and show that your repentance is genuine, and what happens? The whole of heaven is agog with it, filled with joy. There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one repenting sinner.
This Samaritan took the man, “bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine and ... put him on his own beast”. What does that mean? I think it means He sets you up in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit will take possession of you if you obey the gospel. God gives the Holy Spirit “to those that obey him” (Acts 5: 32); if you obey the gospel He will give you the Holy Spirit to dwell in you for ever, and He will hold you constantly in living touch with Christ, if you are willing to be so held. If you do not want the Spirit to serve you, He will just retire, though He will not leave you; but if you want to grieve the Spirit, then I am afraid the Spirit will have to be grieved, and He will feel it. He will feel it that you, to whom God has given the Spirit, are prepared to go on grieving the Spirit instead of welcoming Him, and affording Him full scope. It is a sad thing for a real believer, one of the sons of God, to go on grieving the Holy Spirit. It says, “do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which ye have been sealed for the day of redemption”, Eph 4: 30. The Spirit will not leave you, thank God for that, because He dwells in us for ever, but if you grieve Him He will retire, as much as to say, ‘If you do not want Me I will not force Myself upon you’. We do not want to treat the Holy Spirit of God like that; we surely do not want to do that! You say, ‘Can I not have my fling for a little while? Can I not have just a little bit of self-will, a little bit of self-pleasing?’ Did Jesus please Himself? It says, “For the Christ also did not please himself” (Rom 15: 3); and He has gone up far above all heavens that He might fill all things; He is not going to leave any room in the universe for a person who wants to please himself, He says, ‘That is altogether out of keeping with what I am, for I never entertained the thought of pleasing myself’. So we have to learn from Christ. Do not think it is a question of bondage or anything of that sort, it is real liberty and peace and joy to surrender yourself to the Holy Spirit, and seek to be preserved day by day in living attachment of heart to Christ.
This Samaritan takes out two pence and gives them to the innkeeper, and says, “Take care of him”. I think the innkeeper represents the Holy Spirit operating through the saints. No doubt the inn is the circle of the saints, and the Spirit is Christ in the saints to take care of the saints who are entrusted to them. So you come to a place where you are taken good care of. The Lord leaves that with the lawyer, and just asks which was it who was neighbour to him that fell among the robbers. He says, “He that shewed him mercy”, and Jesus says, “Go, and do thou likewise”.
I leave it with you. This is a very familiar scripture to us, but these things have been spoken by Jesus Himself, and they represent divine feelings, divine compassions, and divine activities. We must not just read the Scriptures and say, ‘Oh yes, that is the parable of the good Samaritan’ and leave it at that. They are intended to impress us with the reality of divine feelings, divine desires, and divine compassion, so that God wants to be known in all the love and grace and compassion of His heart. May He grant that by means of the gospel we may increase in the knowledge of God, for His Name’s sake!
BOURNEMOUTH
19th May 1968
From The Word Proclaimed, 1969
____________________