EVANGELISATION
[p. 329] EVANGELISATION
I wish to make clear the peculiar import of this chapter; my thought being to show how irrepressible the spirit of evangelisation is during the present dispensation. I desire to emphasise that, so that our hearts may be encouraged as those interested in the gospel. It is a great thing to see that the spirit of evangelisation continues. If there is anything that the wicked one is set against, it is the gospel; it is an immense encouragement to see that at what we may call the darkest period of the church’s history; that is, the darkest period of its history as threatened from without, not from within, the evangelical spirit there was irrepressible. It should be an immense cheer to us to see it.
I do not think it is the Lord’s mind that there should be apathy in regard to the gospel, I believe on the contrary that His thought would be to promote interest in, and sympathy with, it; and so I think this chapter is set here to show how irrepressible it is; and even in the period, darkest from divisions arising within the church, you will find that when the Lord through the apostle makes provision for evangelical work, he enjoins Timothy, while not specifically naming him as an evangelist, to do the work of one.
I need not say, beloved friends, that the injunctions to Timothy are intended to regulate, and to stimulate, all those who would be engaged in the testimony, in view of the apostle’s removal from the scene of it; hence it applies to our own day. While one would deprecate the thought of persons assuming to be evangelists, it is plain that the Lord would encourage the spirit of evangelisation.
Now, as I was saying, the church was threatened [p. 330] from without; its very existence was threatened. It was the aim of the enemy to obliterate it completely; he had no less a thought than that. You may be assured that Satan’s activities have a very wide bearing. I do not think he always accomplishes his ends; but his aims are unmistakeable. He works with a definite purpose; he works systematically; and so here, his aim was to blot out every trace of the church. That is what you get in the beginning of Acts 8. The stoning of Stephen was the beginning of a tremendous campaign against the church; and there was not wanting a Vessel in every way suited to the moment. Satan had his vessel; a man was there who, although young, could stand up deliberately and hold the clothes of those who stoned Stephen who, we may say, was the greatest reproduction of Christ here. Satan’s vessel to accomplish his purpose was Saul. Stephen was a wonderful reproduction of Christ. He was the reflection of the Man who glorified God here; that was what Stephen was. It is well worth pondering Stephen, a man “of like passions with ourselves”, but who had become a reflection of that Man who had glorified God here perfectly. They saw Stephen’s face, and it shone like that of an angel; there was the reflection of the heavenly Man in Stephen. Wonderful testimony! And then his address, his speech, was in every way equal to his countenance. His countenance reflected the face of Jesus; and his address was in every way in accord with his countenance, he was a reproduction of his Master.
Saul stood there deliberately, not actuated by zeal to take up a stone, others did that; but he stood and held their clothes; there was deliberate intent in that man; he was unmoved: he stood there and he held the clothes of those who put the martyr to death, for he was consenting to it. Saul was no ordinary man, he was a man of tremendous self-will;
[p. 331] a man of tremendous self-confidence; and a man of tremendous natural force. He was taken up by the wicked one, and was the instrument by which that wicked one intended to obliterate every trace of the church. You will have noticed at the beginning of the chapter that Saul made havoc of the church. See how he went into detail; he was not simply a sort of general enemy of the church; he went into houses; “entering into every house, and hailing men and women committed them to prison”. Thank God, after he became the servant of Christ he did not give up going from house to house; he went from house to house and ministered the gospel; but here, as the agent of the wicked one, he was determined to obliterate the church, entering into every house and haling men and women committed them to prison. Now, those were the conditions under which the incidents related in this chapter came into evidence.
So, beloved friends, I dwell now on the spirit of evangelisation. I believe the chapter, as I said, is specially designed to show how irrepressible that spirit is; it is provided for in the admonitions to Timothy; and in the close of the church’s history on earth, the spirit of evangelisation is apparent; “whosoever will, let him come, and take of the water of life freely;” Revelation 22. The evangelical spirit continues on to the coming of the Lord. I have spoken of all this to the Lord’s people who are present; for it is easier to speak to the saints, than to sinners, for the simple reason that there is more sympathy; and so I have ventured to dwell on these things so as to arouse or increase your interest in the gospel. Now, Philip is, I think, the only person in the Scriptures formally spoken of as an evangelist. There were many evangelists, doubtless the apostles were all evangelists, and there were others; but, I [p. 332] believe, Philip is brought in here as the representative of the evangelical spirit; he is spoken of as “Philip the evangelist”, and the whole chapter, we may say, is devoted to his ministry; he is specially marked by zeal in the gospel. These things may be very simple for most of you, but I think it is worthy of note that here, between the death of Stephen, and the calling out of Paul, the evangelical spirit is seen in activity; and, before going on to the passage I have read, I would call attention to Philip’s work in Samaria.
We are told that Philip went down to Samaria, and preached Christ. Now that is worthy of note. Samaria was rival to Jerusalem. The Lord had been there in His ministry, and He had a remarkable experience there. I think the incident relating to the Lord’s visit to Samaria is one of the most remarkable in Scripture. He met there a woman of Samaria, who was a sinner, and a remarkable conversation, a remarkable interchange of thought, took place between the Lord and that woman. I do not enlarge upon it; but she came to the conclusion that He was the Christ. She says, “Is not this the Christ?” The Messiah of Israel was there, and she was looking for Him. She said, “when he comes, he will tell us all things;” and the Lord says, “I that speak unto thee am he”. I do not remember that He ever presented Himself in that way to any other. Think of His grace! Think of how He deals with souls. One wonders why He should have touched on such wondrous things in speaking to that woman; the very highest truths, beloved friends, in relation to Christianity were treated of between the Lord and the woman of Samaria. She says, “I perceive thou art a prophet;” but when she went to the people of the city, she says, “Come, see a man who told me all things that ever I did, is not this the Christ?”
When the Lord has dealings with a soul, He brings [p. 333] His own credentials with Him. You who have had intercourse with the Lord know that. Has the Lord ever approached your soul? When He approaches a soul, He carries His own credentials with Him; and they are convincing. The credentials that Christ gives is that He is God’s Anointed. God’s anointing necessitates God’s will having been carried out, and maintained. Before a man could be anointed, he must have maintained God’s will. God will not seal what is not to His approval. Now, Christ was in every way to God’s approval; as Peter says of Him, “a man approved of God among you by miracles, and wonders, and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know: him being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it”. God anointed that Man; God says, as it were, ‘This is the Man of My choice’. He was approved of God; He pleased God, and God anointed Him. He takes Him up as a vessel; that is the idea of the Christ. He is the anointed One, and thus He goes about doing good, that is to say, He approaches your soul as the anointed One. God has taken Him up, and He approaches your soul with credentials such as that.
Now, what is your conclusion as to the Christ? I do not ask you what the Scriptures have presented; for really in Scripture things are largely worked out as conclusions. Scripture presents moral conclusions. What are your conclusions about Christ? People do not think much about Him. This is an extremely superficial age; and yet, it is an age of great vaunting. But what do you think of the Christ? He approaches your soul; He intends to make an impression on your soul. What impression did He make on this [p. 334] Samaritan? She says, I have met a man that told me everything; He told me all I ever did. That is a wonderful disclosure; to have your whole history presented to you as in a mirror. The Lord can do that for you. He will do that at the judgment seat. He will gather up your whole history and present it to you there. But He presents it to you now, that you may judge it and condemn it. Oh, beloved friends, that woman condemned it; she left her water pot; she forgot all about it; she left it, and went back to the city; and she went back with an intention to present Christ; she said, ‘Is not He the Christ?’ Well, now, Philip goes down to Samaria and he confirms that testimony. He went down, and presented “the Christ” to them; he confirmed the Lord’s testimony. Philip had a wonderful Forerunner in his mission. The Lord of glory had been there before Philip; he had sown the seed in Samaria; then Philip went down and preached Christ, and they believed, and the result was that there was great joy. Then Peter and John went down and prayed that they might receive the Holy Spirit; and they received it. I do not believe that joy would have continued without the reception of the Spirit. It was the joy produced by light. Light is a pleasant thing if you have been in the dark. But the joy would have been ended quickly if Peter and John had not followed down. The Holy Spirit has a wonderful divine office to perform in the Christian. The great object of the Holy Spirit is to maintain the joy produced by the light. When your soul is illuminated there is joy produced; there is joy in the knowledge of the Saviour, of the Christ, of the Man whom God has anointed. But how long does the joy last? There is a good deal of evangelisation going on now, and I verily believe that souls do get light; but, beloved friends, you want the joy produced [p. 335] by that light to be maintained in your souls. Now, if the Spirit of God is received He maintains you in the good of the light.
But I only say that in passing. What I want to show you is the rapidity of the Spirit’s activities here. He takes away Philip from that remarkable work. The whole city was moved by it, even the greatest man, Simon Magus, was moved by it. One might have thought that the spirits of the saints would have been completely crushed after the awful onslaught at the death of Stephen; but they went everywhere preaching the Word, and the apostles, Peter and John, are sent down into Samaria, and the Samaritans for the first time are connected with God. They were intruders; they had been transported to Samaria; they had no right there; they were all Gentiles. Think of the Gentiles being taken up and connected with God by His Spirit. The Lord, in speaking to the woman, carefully maintains the place of Jerusalem. Samaria had no title at all in respect of God’s ways in connection with the earth, but now, for the first time, Samaria is linked up with God. Think of the wondrous grace of God! He imparts His Spirit to the Gentiles; He connects us livingly with Christ. These Samaritans were connected with Christ by His Spirit. Do you understand that you are linked up with the Christ?
Well, now, Philip is caught away, he is directed to go down to the wilderness, to a desert place; he, is called from a lively, thronged city, where his preaching had set the whole city in motion, and produced great joy. Philip, an evangelist entirely subject to the Spirit, goes where he is told, without any question; he moves here under God’s will, as Christ did. That is the idea of an evangelist. I should like to enlarge upon it, if only I had time; and you will bear with me; I want to show you the kind of testimony that Philip presented to the [p. 336] eunuch. The eunuch had been up at Jerusalem; he had gone there to worship. I do not enlarge upon what he found in Jerusalem. What did he find there? He had gone up to worship, and he found an empty temple. The house was still standing, but there was no glory there. The glory had departed. Had he been there a little while before, the glory was there. The Lord of glory, beloved friends, was there. I do not say He was shining in the temple; but in the glory of His person He had been in Jerusalem; but He had departed from it, and He was now in heaven. Stephen saw the glory. The Shekinah had been in the temple, but now it was up there; and Stephen saw “the glory of God and Jesus standing”; there it was. What I want to show you is, that what was presented to the eunuch was not the Messiah, not the Christ, but the MAN.
It is a remarkable thing in how many ways Christ is presented to the soul. If it be a question of the world and the officialism that exists in the world — the political system around us, the Christ is presented. God has no pleasure in the world system, and He would deliver men from it. This He does by the testimony of the Christ. What has God pleasure in? “Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion”. The heathen raged and the people imagined a vain thing; they raged against the Lord and against His Anointed. God says, “I have set my King” (that is Jesus, the anointed One), “upon my holy hill of Zion”. Now, the Christ is presented to your soul as delivering you from all that which is around you, which is what I understand by the political world; you need deliverance from that. A man who is mixed up with the world, is not delivered; he is not saved; do not make any mistake about it, beloved friends. You must be on the side of God’s Anointed. God has an official system of His own, and Christ is the Head of it. Christ is rejected on earth, but He is nevertheless God’s Anointed. And Philip preached Christ. Souls need to be delivered from the official system, the political world, and from the man that is in it. What delivers you from the man that is in it? The presentation of God’s Man; that is Jesus. What do you think of Him?
But now we come to the eunuch. He was reading from Isaiah 53. What Isaiah presents is not the Christ exactly, it is the MAN. John cites this passage and he adds this, “These things said Esaias, when he saw his glory, and spake of him;” John 12: 41. What was the glory? Isaiah says, “Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground”. That was Jesus; a tender plant; as a root out of a dry ground; that was what Christ was under God’s eye. He was a root; there was fidelity in Him. What do you think of that Man? “He hath no form or comeliness; and when we shall see him there is no beauty (lordliness) that we should desire him ...”. There is nothing of earthly glory about Him; nothing lordly that we should desire Him. That was their judgment, beloved friends, and what is your judgment? I know many young people are ashamed of Christ, because they do not see lordliness in Him. Had He come as a great hero, as a great conqueror, it would have been different; they would rather read about Napoleon than about Christ. Jesus grew up under Jehovah’s eye as a tender plant. Think of that. That expressed the energetic fidelity that was in Him. The whole chapter is a delineation of what Christ was as Man.
Now, the eunuch read that chapter, and what did he think of this Man? His heart was drawn out to Him. The chapter presented a wonderful Man to him, and he says, “Of whom speaketh the prophet this? of himself, or of some other man?” Is your
[p. 338] heart touched as Jesus is presented to you? Now, what did Philip do? He began at that same scripture, and preached unto him JESUS. What a text for a preacher! The eunuch was, I suppose, a proselyte; he was an Ethiopian. I think the Lord created the opportunity. If you are a servant of the Lord, you may depend upon it, He creates opportunities for you. He created the opportunity for Philip. Now, Philip did not say, You ought to have begun earlier, and read in the beginning of Isaiah. He began “at the same scripture”, and he evangelises to him the Man, Jesus. Young people require to have Jesus. They are extremely exposed to the influences of men. The great point in Colossians, to refer to it for a moment, is that you should not be influenced by man but by Christ. So Philip evangelises Jesus to this eunuch. What effect had it upon him? He says, ‘Why should I not be baptised?’ What did he mean by that? I will tell you. His heart was illuminated, the evangelist had illuminated his heart, by preaching to him Jesus; the prophet set him thinking. That is what a prophet does.
There is a prophetic side to the gospel. It sets the conscience in activity. That is why the woman of Samaria said to the Lord, “I perceive that thou art a prophet”. He set her conscience working; and that is what the prophet did to the eunuch, and then Philip preached unto him Jesus; and what about Him? That He was taken from prison and from judgment; who shall declare His generation? His life was taken from the earth. His life! “What! the life of that Man?” I could understand the eunuch saying, That is the only Man who ought to live. And rightly for the Man depicted in Isaiah 53 is the only Man entitled to live; but His life had been taken from the earth; He was cut off from the land of the living.
[p. 339] What are you going to do about that, beloved friends? That Man who is presented there to your heart has been cut off! The Lord cherished everything that was of God here. Do you think the Lord did not feel it that He was cut off? He asked life of God, and God gave it to Him in resurrection, but He cherished everything in which He was set here, His relations after the flesh, everything was real to Christ, but He was cut off from the land of the living. Here is a Man who is the embodiment of every moral trait of beauty; and that Man dies.
What are you going to do? Has He won your heart? Well, He won the eunuch’s heart; and he says, ‘I want to be baptised’. He understood baptism. Philip did not propose baptism to him. Philip had not been given the keys of the kingdom. Peter had the keys of the kingdom, and he commands baptism. That is to say, Peter lifts from the Gentiles the limitations that God had placed upon them. The Gentiles were bound, God had bound them by certain governmental limitations, but Peter removed these for the Lord commanded him to do so. It is very interesting to see that directly the Lord introduced the church in Matthew 16, He commits the administration of the kingdom to Peter. He says, “I give to thee the keys (not of the church, but) of the kingdom”. And, “whatsoever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven”. That was Peter’s commission in a few words; he removes the restrictions off the Gentiles by the command that they should be baptised. I dwell upon that just to show you the connection here. It took Peter a good while to come to it. God had given His Spirit to the Gentiles before Peter really used the keys — God had wrought before the apostle acted, but nevertheless Peter had the keys, and so he commands Cornelius and his company in Acts 10 [p. 340] to be baptised in the name of the Lord. The door is thrown wide open to the Gentiles; the restrictions and limitations, that God had placed upon them, had been removed by Peter.
But what you see here in Acts 8 is not that, for Philip had no mission in regard to the kingdom; he had no keys. The wish of the eunuch to be baptised was the result of the light which Philip had given him about that Man. He says, ‘I want to be in identification with that Man’. Now do you understand that? Ruth says to Naomi, “Where thou diest I will die, and there will I be buried”. The eunuch came to that! What about you? What kind of a place has Jesus in your heart? Do you want identification with Jesus? That is your present privilege. The eunuch says, “See, here is water”. You have not to go far for water: there is plenty of it all around, and He goes down into it. Well, look! Philip goes down into it with him. The light is light, no matter by whom it is communicated or presented; but it is a great thing to see that the vessel is in keeping with the light. Every baptism is accepted that is done in the name of the Lord; baptism is baptism, but how many baptisers today go down into the water? Now, “sprinkling” is the use of water, but very little water. Philip went down with the eunuch into the water. I have no doubt that Philip was in complete accord with the light he had presented; he went down into the water, and now his mission is completed. An evangelist that goes down into the water can be used again: he will not be elated by a conversion. You can scarcely conceive a more remarkably successful evangelist than Philip; he is the embodiment of the spirit of evangelisation. This is a remarkable chapter; it is, in a sense, the most evangelical chapter you can find. Philip is eminently successful; he was successful in Samaria, and he is successful here. He was like the Lord.
[p. 341] The Lord went down into the Jordan. He said, “it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness”, and the Lord of glory went down into the waters of baptism with the repentant remnant.
Now, Philip will be used again, so he is taken away by the Spirit, and is found at Azotus, and passing through he preached in all the cities. The Lord led him on; and he preached in city after city. And what about the eunuch? He is in God’s hands. Baptism puts you in the Lord’s hands. It does not put you into the church. You may be in it before you are baptised. Cornelius and his company were. They had the Holy Spirit before they were baptised; baptism puts you in the Lord’s hands. What do you think baptism virtually means? It means that you identify yourself with the Man whom you love, but, then, that Man is gone from the earth. Baptism is in the name of the Lord. Now, if you are baptised in the name of the Lord you are in His hands. What will He do for you? That eunuch was going down to Abyssinia, and you may depend upon it there was no help for him there.
When you are converted you go back to your family or your business, there is no help for you there; but now you have taken sides with Christ, you call upon the name of the Lord, and what have you? what can the Lord do for you? Well, beloved friends, He has all power in heaven and on earth. “Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be delivered”. You now love Him and you have committed yourself to Him, you are identified with Him. What will He do for you? He will undertake for you. There is not anything that you require that you will not get from Christ. By baptism I understand you unfurl your standard. One sees badges in the city today; a good many people are showing their colours; it is a great thing to do that [p. 342] for Christ, to unfurl the standard. He has committed Himself to protect you, and so the eunuch went on his way rejoicing. He did not have Philip any longer, but he was baptised. I would advise you not to go into the world unless as a baptised person. If you are in the world it is impossible to get out of it until you die, or the Lord takes you. What is it to go into the world as a baptised person? It is a person who has taken sides with the. Lord.
The eunuch went down to Abyssinia as a baptised person. He did not go back as he came out of it. I do not say that he gave up his office. I believe he carried out his services better than before he was committed to the death of Jesus, and had come under the protection of Jesus; and I am sure he found that protection continuous. Well, that was what I had to say; and one would earnestly seek that we might judge ourselves, committing ourselves to the Lord, recognising Him fully, remembering that whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be delivered.
Pages 343 - 435. “The Heavenly System and the Glory of the Son of God”, Indianapolis, 1912 (Volume 15).