NOTES ON SCRIPTURE 1895 NO. 11
NOTES ON SCRIPTURE 1895 [p. 53] NO. 11
The Lord is seen in two positions here. He is rejected by man. He quotes this psalm in Matthew 22: 44: “The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool”. Christ was rejected after His public service, after setting forth the heart of God to man. Man had been always perverse and rebellious, but “now they have no cloke for their sin ... now have they both seen and hated both me and my Father”. He is here called away to sit down at God’s right hand, and His sitting there (see Hebrews 10: 12) is a proof that the work for us is finished. But this is not all; His new position in heaven is that He is great Priest after the order of Melchisedec. As you accept Him in His rejection, you know Him in His exaltation. As your heart has any true sense of His rejection, that He died here, the shadow of His death is over everything. The more you feel His rejection, the more you rejoice that you know Him in His exaltation, and you will find that if any one (each one beginning with himself) does not feel His rejection down here, he does not realise His exaltation at the right hand of God. Any heart that had a true sense of His death would not look for any bright thing in the place where He died; even the cultivation of a flower would be incongruous.
In christendom the Lord’s supper is reduced to ‘remembrance that Christ died for thee’, and thus they are diverted from the Lord’s desire in asking us to remember Him. He counted on the eleven when He said, “This do in remembrance of me”. (Luke 22:19) Even the natural man will share his joys with many, but he confides his sorrow only to his chief friends. If we are not in concert with the Lord in the one - His rejection, we cannot be in concert with Him as to the other - His exaltation.
[p. 54] Jacob can say, Rachel is dead; he looks for nothing here. How much more should we be able to say that we look for nothing here, seeing we have a compensation in knowing our Lord in His exaltation. In the assembly we remember Him in death, but we know Him in the holiest. We have the right of entrance into the presence of God, and there only can we worship. The deeper our remembrance of His death here, the more absolute our association with Him in glory. The past and the present are both before us in the assembly.