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GOD’S LONGINGS EXPRESSED IN THE GOSPEL

D. Robertson

One seeks help from God to convey an impression of God’s longings for you. There could not be a gospel preaching without an expression of the longings of God. Here in the book of Exodus, we get some insight into the feelings of His heart. In the previous section (Exodus 3), it is the people who cry, the crying of distress, and God answers them. If there is one here today who is feeling distress, we would urge you to cry unto God, for He will answer you.

We can say that with certainty, because He has answered us. He says, “call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver thee”, and then He says, “and thou shalt glorify me”, Psalm 50: 15. That is God. dear friend. We can preach the glad tidings with certainty. The trumpet does not need to give an uncertain sound. For we speak things we know well, and we can tell you that if you are in distress of soul and cry unto God, He will answer you. We would urge you to do it! God Himself, we may say, is the great Answerer, and God loves to hear the cry of need. There is no one who understands your need like God. He understands it, and more than that, He has provided for your need! He has provided for the sinner’s need in the Person and in the work of His beloved Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. There is no need that cannot be met; God can meet the need of the guiltiest sinner. How precious that is! Most of us here would have experienced feeling the burden of our guilt, the naggings of conviction which went on and on.

You became more and more uncomfortable and the weight of the burden became more unbearable. One would speak to you feelingly as knowing these things. If you are feeling that way, you can be sure that it is God who is bringing you into conviction, and He is bringing you into conviction that He might bring you to conversion. God desires that you may be converted, that you may be changed, and instead of being a distressed sinner, that you might find your place as one of God’s sons.

So the people cry in chapter 3, but God makes His longings known here in chapter 4. He says, “Let my son go”. There is a whole world set up by the devil, by Satan, to hold you from giving God what He desires. But God has undertaken for you and He has broken the power of the world’s system for the believer. He has broken it in the death of Christ. That is what we get later on in this book. They come to the Red Sea, and all the Egyptian forces are pursuing them. There comes a point when God takes off the chariot wheels of the Egyptians. The world can go no further, and He brings the whole world system down. It is a type of what He has done in the death of Christ. God has done that in view of your being extricated from the world. He has judicially dealt with this world, what it means morally. It says, “once in the consummation of the ages he has been manifested for the putting away of sin by his sacrifice”, Hebrews 9: 26. Think of God dealing with the whole power of the world system, that you and I might be extricated and delivered from it. It says, “Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the sea-shore”, Exodus 14: 30.

What a mighty work Christ has accomplished in His death! It says elsewhere, “I gave Egypt for thy ransom”, Isaiah 43: 3. Think of God doing that. He gave Egypt for it, because so much so was it on God’s heart and in His longings to have this people for Himself, and to have you and me for Himself. Think of God dealing with the whole world system! And yet, we can go further in the glad tidings, He gave His Son for your ransom, that you might be delivered and that you might be secured for Himself. How God longs for you! Oh, that one might be given ability by the Spirit to convey this thought, that God is longing for you. He has provided for you in His Son and in the death of His Son. He has provided for you to the end that there might be no distance between yourself and Him. Indeed, it says, “being enemies, we have been reconciled to God through the death of his Son”, Romans 5: 10. How affecting that is! God has operated in spite of your enmity and in spite of my enmity. God has operated that the distance might be totally removed so that you and I might be brought into nearness to Himself. God longs for it. He says, “Let my son go, that he may serve me”.

God has a claim on you, young man, young woman, God has a claim on you. He is your Creator. He may not be your Father; He is not the Father of every man; He is the Father of every Christian, but He is every man’s Creator. He has a claim on you, a prior claim, a right to you. He has a right to speak to you, and to speak in power to you, and He has a right to say, “My son, give me thy heart”. God has that right, and that is what God is saying to you.

The world is fighting for you, and the world around is busy to keep you immersed in its activities, but God is saying, “My son, give me thy heart”, Proverbs 23: 26. He is your Creator, but He is more than that. He is your Redeemer.

He has become known redemptively in the glorious operations undertaken by the “Son of his love”, Colossians 1: 13. Do you know that? Have you the precious knowledge of a Redeemer, a Saviour God known in “the Son of his love”? Now God could not express His love in creation; God could not express His feelings in creation. He expressed His feelings in the death of Jesus. We sung that hymn this morning.

‘But the glory of Thy greatness

Finds in love its counterpart;

Jesus’ death th’eternal witness

To the feelings of Thy heart’. (Hymn 38)

It must be so, there could be no other counterpart to it. He says, “Let my son go, that he may serve me”. But in order to secure you, it meant the death of Jesus. It is the wonderful outlet of the feelings of the heart of God! What does it mean to you? God has that claim that no other has on you, and He is saying, ‘My son! My son!’ While you are bent to go your own way, to fill out your own ambitions, you are bent to go the way the world is going. But there is a voice saying, “My son, give me thy heart”. That is what God wants, He wants your heart, He wants your affections. God is longing for your heart, longing for your life, that your life might not be a misspent life, a life given over to the service of the devil, the god of this world, but a life spent in the holy service of God. Dear young man, dear young woman, He is worthy of it. I am sure there are those who are praying at this moment that the word might be effective; that you might be turned by the appeal of God.

How often we listen to men whose breath is in their nostrils (see Isaiah 2: 22). They are here today and they are gone tomorrow. Yet we give so much credence to what they say. What about listening to God, the One who is from eternity to eternity? Think of His might! Think of His majesty! Think of His glory! Think of the

awe that should be in our souls as we speak of God. Yet that God is saying, “My son, give me thy heart”. Oh, I plead with you to listen to God’s word and to answer to the appeal of God’s love. God has been made known in “the Son of his love”. Think of Jesus at Calvary; think of the awfulness of the burden that He bore there; think of Christ going into death and fathoming that distance, the distance that really belonged to you and to me. He has gone into that distance. He has fathomed it. Why has He done that? I will tell you. He went into our distance that we might know His nearness. That is the truth of the gospel. God wants you near to Himself, and it is Christ’s nearness that God has in mind for you. As we sometimes say, it is no low place within the door, it is the nearness of sonship. In the scripture in Jeremiah, God is speaking and He is calling to the heavens. He says, “Be astonished, ye heavens, at this, and shudder; be amazed very much, saith Jehovah. For my people have committed two evils—they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, to hew them out cisterns, broken cisterns that hold no water”. It is almost as if God is amazed that His people should turn away from Him. Think of the feelings of God at His creature, at any one of us turning away from Him. Let me ask, What is your life? Are you really satisfied in it? From what are you drawing your satisfaction? The hymn says—

‘I tried the broken cisterns, Lord,

But ah! the waters failed!

E’en as I stooped to drink they’d fled,

And mocked me as I wailed’.

How many of us have tried them! The cisterns of this world, they are broken, they hold no satisfaction. They may appear so great! The road ahead might seem a golden one; but, if it is apart from God the end of that road is disaster—and it is worse than that, it is death. Scripture says, “There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof is the ways of death”, Proverbs 14: 12; 16: 25. We appeal to you to return to the fountain of living water. It is God Himself, known in the Person of the Lord Jesus.

Remember what the Lord Himself could say to the woman in John 4, “If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that says to thee. Give me to drink, thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water”. John 4: 10. Oh, how amazing it is! Have you heard about it? Better still, have you known it? God is ready to meet your need, and fill and satisfy your heart, as He draws you to Christ, the wondrous fountain of living water.

We read, “Is Israel a bondman?” Oh, I speak to Christians. Maybe you have known something in your history of God extricating you, delivering you from the world, but perhaps you have gone back to it. Why should you be a bondman to this world? Why should one of God’s sons be a slave in Egypt? Oh, we appeal to you, Christian friend, young man, young woman, to listen to God today. Are you a bondman to this world, a slave to its habits? God would work for your extrication, work for your deliverance. It says, “Why is he become a spoil?” Why have you become a spoil? Are you a spoil to this world, open to all its influences, subject to all its conditions? The world would impose its conditions upon you.

Why have you become a spoil? God never intended that, he says, “Let my son go”. The place that God has in mind for you is a place of dignity, to set you up here in moral superiority to the world.

Then it says, “Hast thou not procured this unto thyself, in that thou hast forsaken Jehovah thy God, at the time he was leading thee in the way?” How many have proved it! You know the bitterness of a path taken in opposition to the will of God. Oh, we appeal to you! We feel for you if this is the way you are on. And God feels for you, and He would act towards you that He might set your feet on the road of recovery, the way of repentance, the way back to Himself. It says here, “what hast thou to do with the way of Egypt, to drink the waters of Shihor?” What have you to do with the way of the world? One of God’s sons, a redeemed person, what have you to do with the way of Egypt, to drink the waters of the Shihor, waters of the Nile? I understand the literal translation means the muddy waters of the Nile. Think of that, you, who should be drinking the water of life, and drinking it freely; you, who should be knowing the power, the refreshing life-giving power of God’s Holy Spirit working in you, creating affection for Christ day by day; what are you doing drinking the waters of Shihor, the muddy waters of the Nile? The world has been set up in independency of God. What are you doing having your part in it? God would raise these questions with you.

That is the word at this time. God would appeal to you. He has broken the power of the world as a system, and He has broken it in view of your extrication, that you might be here for Himself, and that you might be here for Christ.

Preaching at Birmingham
30 October 1988

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