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MINISTERING TO THE WILL OF GOD

In referring to the will of God, we are reminded of how prominently it occupied our Lord’s mind as having become Man, and as here in God’s service, and in view of His departure. One is affected in referring to the unspeakable depths of feeling which, marked the Lord in facing death; He was “amazed”, we are told, “and deeply depressed”. So thoroughly had He taken up man’s place, and so thoroughly did He understand the import of the will of God as to this position, that He felt it; hence the deep agony, and the words: “Not my will, but thine be done” (Luke 22:42).

In David, as foreshadowing all this, we have a remarkable example in that he ministered to the will of God in his own generation. The Holy Spirit dwells on the life of David peculiarly. Although not, as we would speak today, a very long life, it was a life of compression, a life into which immense events were compressed. In referring to the idea of compression in such a path, one cannot but think of the compression of the life of Jesus, especially the three-and-a-half years of His service. What a life! What events of eternal import were compressed into that life, and how in every moment of it He ministered to the will of God! What He was in private we must leave, but He was cast upon God from the outset. Every breath, every pulsation, every movement in that life was for the will of God. What that was to God, beloved, who but He can fully express? He took occasion at the end of thirty years to speak of it: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I have found my delight” (Matthew 17:5). And what that scene in Gethsemane was, who but God knows fully? those moments of amazement, of depression, when He would at all costs minister to the will of God.

^[p. 135] So, to David, a man of like passions with ourselves, we have this beautiful tribute by the apostle Paul: “Having in his own generation ministered to the will of God, fell asleep”. This is a greater thing than to minister to others, for it fills out what the mind of God delights in. There may be great exploits without ministering to the will of God, without that steady adherence to and support of what pleases God. It is what God has in any one of us that is the whole matter. “Fear God, and keep his commandments”, one has said, is “the whole of man” (Ecclesiastes 12:13). It is what accrues to God that will tell; it is what has told, beloved brethren, and what will tell in that day when things are manifested.

“And the acts of David the king, first and last, behold, they are written in the book of Samuel the seer, and in the book of Nathan the prophet, and in the book of Gad the seer; with all his reign and his might, and the times that passed over him, and over Israel, and over all the kingdoms of the countries”.

How keenly David felt what was current amongst the people of God! “The times that passed over him”, all the years of his service, involving serious crises and conflicts, yet he did not fail of the mind of God, nor shirk the responsibility that fell to him. Thus we may well imitate his faith, considering the issue of his conversation.

It is very beautiful that the Holy Spirit mentions such recorders of David’s life as the prophets Samuel, Nathan, and Gad. We may be assured that the sum total of that ministry to the will of God was gathered up faithfully for the food, the encouragement, and the stimulation of later servants, as these books of Samuel, Nathan, and Gad were read. What a stimulation to ourselves, too, to pursue the path of faith humbly, unostentatiously, but letting nothing miss us that ministers to the will of God; that we may know how the will of God enters into the times that pass over us and minister to it. May the Lord help us, dear brethren.

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