THE WAY OUT OF CONFUSION

Psalms 40: 5-10; 41: 12-13; 45: 1-2; 72: 17-20; 73: 16-17

I want to bring before you the important subject of the way out of confusion. There is great confusion down here - confusion with regard to our spiritual history, our circumstances, and the house of God. God is not the Author of confusion, but of peace. If you go outside and look up to the heavens, you will see no confusion there. “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth His handywork”, Ps 19: 1. Everything moves in order in the vast universe He has called into existence by the word of His power. There is confusion here because men have got away from God, and have become lawless.

If you go back to the beginning there was no confusion. Man was set in the garden, surrounded by every token of God's goodness; but, falling under evil influences and ceasing to respond to that goodness, he became lawless and a moral wreck. Satan succeeded in instilling distrust into the heart of the creature. God is good; the creature was surrounded with every mark of the goodness of God, and He had a perfect right to draw a straight line and say, you must not step over that. Satan said to God, that man is responding to You: I shall make him respond to me. God is always Satan's objective. He throws down the challenge to God, and says, I will repeat myself in this creature. Satan repeated himself morally in man, as the blessed Lord Himself said: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do” (John 8: 44).

How are people to get out of the confusion? By getting into God's will. The confusion has come in by man, but the way out of it has also come by Man. Let me put it to you in a few sentences: “He was manifested to take away our sins, and in Him is no sin. Whosoever abideth in Him sinneth not” (1 John 3: 5, 6). The Lord Jesus came down into the place of the confusion to end it all, and, to bring the light of God into this world. In the very first chapter of the New Testament we are introduced to this Person of whom the prophets had spoken. “Thou shalt call His name Jesus: for He shall save His people from their sins”. And not only so, but a little lower down you get: “They shall call His name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us”, Matt 1: 21, 23. Where God is there is no confusion.

When the confusion came in at the beginning, God, as it were, made haste to speak of another Man. He says to Satan, You wrought the confusion by man, but I will find a way out of it; the seed of the woman shall bruise thy head.

God is going to defeat Satan. He has been pleased to send His dear Son in to the world to teach us to trust God. The glory of man is to trust God; it is moral degradation in the eye of God that we cannot trust Him. The seed of distrust was sown in the heart of poor man, when he got under the power of Satan. In the first book we have the beginning of lawlessness; but in the last book of the Old Testament we find that the Sun of Righteousness was to rise with healing in His wings: and God proposes to change us now by bringing us under the influence of Christ.

In the first book of Psalms, God has found a Man after His own heart who shall fulfil all His will. God has found a Man.

The 40th Psalm is the key to the Book of Psalms, and indeed to all the ways of God: because it brings before us God's will, and God's will lies at the root of all blessing. It is a fine thing in the history of your soul when you recognise that God is the only One who has the right to have a will.

The 41st Psalm sets before us that blessed Man as set before God's face for ever. That Man has fulfilled the will of God in His life here, and has gone into death to fulfil the will of God there, that death might be annulled. There are great men all around who bend everything to their will, but death comes in and moves them off. It is most pitiful; however high and great a man may be, death finishes him, pulls him down so that he cannot lift his hand to his head. The great man has to die! But this blessed Man is set before God's face for ever: and to come out of the confusion, you must come under His influence.

If it is a question of sins, in that one Man God has set forth a mercy-seat through faith in His blood (Romans 3: 25, N.T.). He has been into death and has met all the question of our responsibility, and all the claims of God. The righteousness of God is set forth in Him. God can exercise mercy, and grace flows down to us on the ground of that one Man who lives before His face. “He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for … the whole world” (1 John 2: 2). That is, there can be an administration of the grace and mercy of God reaching down to the vilest through that blessed Man. Everything depends upon the Man who lives before God’s face; that Man has died to sin, and lives to God. By being under the influence of Christ - that is the way out of sin and confusion.

There is a beautiful expression in verse 5 of Psalm 11, which has an application to Israel, but can also be taken up in a Christian way. It is where the Psalm begins, properly speaking; you must read the first four verses at the end of the psalm. Verse 5 begins the subject matter of the psalm: “And Thy thoughts which are to us-ward”. People have their thoughts towards us, they think of us with affection; but if you knew the thoughts of God towards you, it would alter your thoughts towards Him. What wealth there is in that sentence! “His thoughts which are to us-ward”. They can only be thoughts of good and blessing, not thoughts of evil.

Where are those thoughts expressed? God cares for us. He cares for the sparrows, too, but His thoughts to us-ward are eternal. If He has eternal thoughts towards me, surely He will take care of me down here. I recognise the piety which owns the care of God, but the thoughts of God could not be set forth in any favour down here - it is not great enough. Who could set forth the will of God? Only one Person - therefore one voice is sweetly heard here. Could sacrifice and offering set forth the thoughts of God? No, they are not great enough. Could the furniture in the tabernacle? No, the thoughts of God which are to us-ward are set forth in a Man, so we hear Him saying: “Lo, I come” (verse 7). There is One great enough and competent enough to set forth the thoughts of God. The blessed God has come down to us in a Man, yet more than a Man: a divine Person who became Man, because the very language supposes that He is there with God. “Lo, I come”! come to set forth Thy thoughts towards Thy people. “A body hast Thou prepared Me”. It is all within the compass of a Man, the true Urim and Thummim.

The names of the tribes of Israel were borne on the breastplate, and in it were the Urim and Thummim (Exod 28: 29, 30). The Urim means light, and the Thummim means perfection. All the fulness of the Godhead was pleased to dwell in Him, that is Urim; and “ye are complete in Him” (Col 2: 9, 10) is the Thummim. It is not merely that I should know my sins forgiven and that I am going to heaven when I die; but the thoughts are that God should be revealed and responded to. He is going to get what He wants; He will not be thwarted. Because He is love, He loves to be loved. Why did He send His Son? That He might be loved. You say, He sent Him to put away my sins. Yes, but there is the other side - the perfect revelation of His love. If there is any happiness my soul knows - pure unalloyed happiness - it is to love God. He revealed His love in order that there might be an answer back to Him. The glory of the blessed God is the Gospel. His desire is to make Himself known, and that there should be a response from us to what He is. What we have in the Psalm is that there was a Person great enough to reveal God and great enough to respond to Him. The revelation lies in the Urim, and the response in the Thummim. John's gospel is Urim, and Luke's gospel is Thummim. John gives us the revelation of God in Man, while Luke gives us a perfect Man answering to that revelation. The blessed God could look down on one Man, and see in the midst of a ruined degraded race in this sad world that there was One who loved God perfectly. “I delight to do Thy will, O my God: yea, Thy law is within my heart” (verse 8). God is revealed in Him, because He is God; and there was perfect response in Man because He was the perfect Man, so that the revelation and the response are found in one Person. God found one heart to beat true to Him every moment here without interruption. There was one Man down here of whom God could say: “I have found … a man after mine own heart, which shall fulfil all my will” (Acts 13: 22); but He was not available to us till He had died to sin. He was there in His solitude, in His deep perfection. That one Man has died to sin, and now He lives to God and we can live to God in Him.

This is the way out of the confusion, out of lawlessness, out of my own will. I am so to come under the influence of that one Man, that the same response that is in His heart might be in my heart; therefore the first book of Psalms closes with this verse: “And as for me, Thou upholdest me in mine integrity, and settest me before Thy face for ever” (Ps 41: 12). One Man is before God's face for ever, and the way out of the confusion is by Him.

But, you may say (and if so, one thanks God for it), I am travelling along the road of finding out what I am; for me it is “O wretched man that I am!” - “When I would do good, evil is present with me”, (Rom 7: 21, 24); how to perform that which I love I know not. It is selfconsciousness. I, I, I, twenty-seven times in the chapter. I have been along that way; I feel for you greatly. How to perform that which I loved I did not know. Nothing causes greater anguish than not to be able to do what you love. People have said to me, You can do as you like. Yes, I say, I have a new like and I can do it; there was a time when I could not do what I liked. I loved what God loved, but how to do it I did not know. I changed the “I” to “Who”, and I got out of the confusion. I reached that Man who is before God's face for ever, and I was taught this lesson that all I wanted to be was in Him, and He would reproduce Himself in me in the power of the Spirit. “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord”, Rom 7: 24, 25. He embraces Christ; he is married to Another to bring forth fruit to God; he has reached the Man who lives before God’s face for ever. The way out of the confusion is that I am kept under His influence. The Spirit of God has been given to us from Him to link us with Him and to keep us under His influence.

Commencing the 2nd Book of Psalms, you read: “Why art thou cast down, O my soul?” (Psalm 42: 5). There is confusion. “God is not the Author of confusion” (1 Cor 14: 33); “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance” (Ps 42: 5). There is a little rift in the cloud - streams of sunlight coming down; but it is not Christianity. In Psalm 45 it says: “My heart is inditing a good matter: I speak of the things which I have made touching the king: my tongue is the pen of a ready writer; Thou art fairer than the children of men”; far fairer. The Man who lives before God's face for ever is reached by the soul. He eclipses everybody. When Christ ceases to be attractive to you, you are in confusion. When Christ is attractive to you, you are out of confusion. Christ is your true self. I have found perfection, not in myself but in Him, and I have liberty to regard that blessed One as my true self - married to Another to bring forth fruit to God.

I am come into the will of God because I am kept under the influence of Christ. As you are kept under His influence, you are out of the confusion. He has a right to influence me because He took my sins. I can understand that I shall not go to hell because He bore my sins, but He did it that I might come under His influence. People often miss the great point of Isaiah 53 (N.T.) verse 11: “instruct many in righteousness”. It is this, He took your sins that He might instruct you in righteousness. In New Testament language it is: “Who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness” (1 Peter 2: 24). He bore my sins to make me a righteous person. He will have a generation of righteous people for His pleasure. “The pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand” (Isa 53: 10).

In the 72nd Psalm another thing comes into view, and that is the light of another world. The passage I have read in the 41st Psalm closes the first book of Psalms; it closes with a doxology. Psalm 72 is the close of the 2nd book. As you read it, you must say, Well, the confusion is ended now. The world to come is in that Psalm, and in the world to come all the confusion is ended: because everybody down here will be influenced by Christ. The confusion is here now; nations are against nations, everything is rising up, and man glories in his selfishness. The will of one nation is against the will of another. But it is ended in this Psalm; Christ has got His place, and all men and all things are under the influence of Christ. “The bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world” (John 6: 51). What a beautiful thing it would be, supposing the king of this country, whose position is given of God and whose authority we respect, could say (as he could not for a moment), I could wish that every subject of mine could answer to what I am. If he governed all by his moral influence, not by might, would not that be grand? That would be real governing, indeed! - that he could influence his subjects throughout the country by reproducing himself in them.

What you get here is that all are under the blessed influence of Christ, and the confusion is over. The Psalm says: “Blessed be His glorious name for ever.... Amen and amen”. “Let the whole earth be filled with His glory”, not man's glory. All the confusion down here is through man's glory; but when the whole earth is filled with His glory, the confusion is ended. “The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended”, Ps 72: 20. He has nothing more to pray for; he has reached Him - he has reached perfection. God told him, “He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God” (2 Samuel 23: 3). He appreciated it very much, but he broke down. “Although my house be not so with God; yet He hath made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things, and sure” (2 Samuel 23: 5).

It is a very remarkable thing that the next Psalm, which begins the third book of Psalms, begins with great confusion. Here is a man in great confusion. “When I thought to know this, it was too painful for me” (Ps 73: 16). Everything is crooked down here. If you are going to judge God by circumstances, you will be in absolute confusion; you cannot do it. “When I thought to know this it was too painful for me: Until I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their end”, Ps 73: 16, 17. God drew him into His presence. When God draws us into His presence we have got the light of another world. We are out of the confusion and darkness of this world; we are in the light of the presence of God, and the confusion is ended. The grandeur of Christianity lies in two things:- I get the light of life in the Man who lives before God's face for ever, and I get the light of another world to which I belong. He said, “I went into the sanctuary of God”. That is your proper place to live; to live in the light of another Man, and of another world of which that blessed Man is the Centre. When he got back into the sanctuary, then he understood. “So foolish was I, and ignorant: I was as a beast before thee” (verse 22). A beast looks around. If you do that you will get into confusion; you must not judge God by circumstances. Keep in the sanctuary of His blessed presence, and you will get the light of that other world of the 72nd Psalm.

In 2 Corinthians 4: 16, 17, 18, we have a man who lived in the light of another world. You say, was he not in this world? He was, and he had a good share of the troubles and trials of this world; but he says, “though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day”. Listen to him: “Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory”. He was rejuvenated, made younger. What was the secret of it? “while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal”. Christ is the Centre of that. May I look that way? Beloved friends, the things that whiten our heads and furrow our brows and bow us down, are the things that are seen; what will rejuvenate us are the things which are not seen. The proposal is that you shall get younger every year, be rejuvenated every day, while you look at the things which are not seen. If you are looking at anything here, it will die. Christianity puts me in positive possession of that which is outside the reach of death. I have got a Person outside the reach of death, and I have got a prospect. The death shadow lies on me and mine here, but I cannot lose Christ. Ask yourself the question - What do I possess outside the reach of death? Where must you look? You must go into the sanctuary to find it - into the presence of God. You may look around on those who are dear to you; they are not outside the reach of death, neither are you. In one sense you are: death does not overwhelm a Christian according to God because death is our servant, death is ours.

That is what I wanted to shew you. He went into the sanctuary of God. “Then understood I their end” - those were the people he envied; now he begins to pity them. Oh, he says, it is terrible; “Thou castedst them down into destruction” (v 18); “Thou didst set them in slippery places … How are they brought into desolation, as in a moment!”. Verse 20 is one of the most solemn verses of the Bible: “As a dream when one awaketh; so, O Lord, when thou awakest, thou shalt despise their image”. In regard to active interference, God is asleep; God is not actively interfering with things down here now. God is awake in resurrection. The day will come when God will say, Whose image and superscription is this? If it does not bear the image of Christ, God will despise it. He will say, is it Christ? For us it will be His image (Romans 8: 29); but for these people it is very terrible. What will God say? - You shut Me out of your life, I will shut you out of Mine. It is eternal banishment from God; He will despise their image. For us, it goes on to say in 2 Cor 5: 1: “For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens”. It is the image and superscription of Christ for the Christian.

In the presence of God you are nothing; it is happy for you when you are nothing. “I was as a beast before Thee”. I was foolish, I had these hard thoughts of Thee. “Nevertheless I am continually with Thee: Thou hast holden me by my right hand” (v 23). When he was thinking these hard thoughts of God, God never let him go: He brought him back to the sanctuary. That is restoring grace. Now his heart begins to expand. “Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee; my flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever” (vv 25 and 26). “Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory” (v 24). In the sanctuary there was the assurance of it. The way out of confusion is to keep in the presence of God.

There are two things in the sanctuary: new conditions of life, and the light of another world. God revealed and God responded to in the life of another Man, and the light of another world seen in Christ: for He is the centre of that world which God will bring in directly, a new order of things entirely, where we shall be out of confusion.

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From an un-dated leaflet