THE CHARIOT OF ISRAEL

C. J. H. Davidson

2 Kings 2: 1, 2, 4, 6, 8–12 (to “saw him no more”); 13: 14–19; Galatians 6: 15–18

My desire is to say a word about “the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof!” The chariot of Israel must involve great movement in the testimony. We do well to stick closely to the actual words of Scripture because, despite the pictures in books about Elijah’s going up into heaven, he never went up in the chariot of fire. Jehovah would take him up “by a whirlwind”; that is rapture! Philip the evangelist had a similar experience when the Spirit of the Lord caught him away from his convert, and he was found many miles away in a different place altogether. A whirlwind can do that; how much more the Spirit of God! When we go up, beloved, at the assembling shout of Christ, it will be the power of the Spirit that will be in operation. You think of the resurrection of Jesus—the Father raised Him, He raised Himself, and was “made alive in the Spirit”, 1 Peter 3: 18. What power there was when Christ was raised and was glorified by ascending into heaven! But Elijah’s experience was remarkable; the only man, apart from Jesus, to go up in such a way. Moses died, but Elijah did not die. He was carried up by a whirlwind into the heavens.

My point today, for the encouragement of my heart and the hearts of the brethren, is that the chariot of Israel is still here, and the testimony is going on to a triumphant conclusion. Let no one think that things are going to peter out; they are not. We do not despise the day of small things, because the greatest event is about to happen, and it will not happen as the result of a nuclear explosion. Let the brethren’s hearts be stabilised, especially those of the young people. It was said in the last war that the assembly is not going to be bombed into heaven, nor will she be. The Lord will see to that. Think of the intrinsic value of the assembly to the heart of Christ! She is going to go up in her own dignity. She will come down again to the renewed earth in her own dignity. But Elijah was going to be taken up because God loved him so. You say, ‘Did he not fail?’; but what servant has not failed?—except the Servant of servants, Christ Himself.

But Elijah was loved by heaven. So he goes over this ground, and it is very sad ground to go over, because in all these places that he visits sin had come in, and the transgressions of the people of God were found there. Think of the beginning, Gilgal. Elijah knew what that was—the condemnation of the flesh, in me and in us all; Gilgal, the place where God removed the stink of the world from us. We are not to be like it, beloved. Remember that word we had this afternoon—“Let the filthy make himself filthy still”, Revelation 22: 11. We are to be righteous still, and holy still. But Gilgal, the place of the rolling away of the reproach of this world from the people of God, what had it become? Amos 4: 4 will tell you what it had become—multiplying transgressions at Gilgal, and they had made it a place of sacrifice to demons. This is what, alas, has happened in the history of christendom. Directly after the apostles’ time the moral collapse came in.

Then Bethel; you say, the house of God, where Jacob found himself once in the presence of a God who insisted on blessing him in spite of all that Jacob was. He said, “This is ... the house of God”, and so he named it; and I have found, beloved, in that same house, that in spite of all that I am and all that I have done, God has sovereignly and graciously blessed. He is doing it all around us, in this room, today. He is intent upon blessing. And yet, what had Bethel become? You read Amos 7! Amos says, “I was no prophet”. There was no official hierarchy, no enthronement in a cathedral, for Amos—a herdman and a gatherer of sycamore fruit. The priest (Amos 7: 12, 13) said to him, You, Amos, prophesy no more in Bethel; it is the king’s sanctuary, and the house of the kingdom. We do not want the word of God. Also in Amos, Bethel is said (see Amos 4: 4) to transgress. So these are places that had gone wrong that were being visited by the prophet Elijah for the last time. Let us take heed, beloved. The word of God will not always be found in this scene. There will come a time of famine—not of thirst for water, nor hunger for bread, but a famine of hearing the word of God (see Amos 8: 11). They will run to and fro and not find it.

So they go to Jericho, the place of the overthrow of this world, at the very entrance to the land of blessing. What had happened at Jericho? Already in the book of Kings Jericho had been rebuilt in the lawlessness of man. God had said that Jericho was never to be rebuilt, but man says, I want a nice religious world, so I will rebuild it myself. God says, You will do it in the death of your first-born, if you do it (Joshua 6: 26), and so it came about (1 Kings 16: 34).

Jericho, that wicked city, had been built again, and Elijah, pays it a visit, but he does not stay there. He says, “Jehovah has sent me to the Jordan”. What was the Jordan? The confines of the land, and Elijah was going right outside the profession at that time. Some of us have had to have heart-rending experiences in leaving where the whole truth, as it is in Jesus, is not held, though there are believers there; there were believers in Israel when Elijah was doing this journey with Elisha. The two of them went on and talked. I love that. It opens the door for the delightful experiences that we have together over the Scriptures in reading meetings, conversation together one with another.

They two went on and talked. How near heaven was as those two men talked together! Then the chariot of Israel parts them—the one man going up to heaven without dying, the other man left here to bear the testimony of grace so long as God pleased to continue.

Elisha would like that. The Syrians were the great enemy of Israel. A type of the king of the north was the Syrian to Israel, and always a persecutor. But do you know what grace does with persecutors? An army was invading Israel, and Elisha says to Jehovah, “Smite this nation, I pray thee, with blindness”. God did it. That might seem severe, but wait! They were after Elisha, to put him to death, to rid Israel of the word of God. But it was not to be, and hence they were smitten with blindness. Elisha said to them, “Follow me, and I will bring you to the man whom ye seek”. He led them right into the middle of Samaria. The king of Israel said, “My father, shall I smite? Shall I smite them?” Elisha says, No; you give them bread and water. He prayed again, and their eyes were opened and they found themselves in the presence of divine grace. That is where I found myself, and I do not want to be anywhere else, held in the pursuit of the testimony, but in the spirit of grace. So that wonderful scene ends, but there is still the chariot of Israel and the horsemen.

In chapter 13 we have king Joash—he was not a good king either—but he did get the words of Elisha right, because he repeats them. Elisha himself is leaving this scene. What is going to happen now? I would remind the brethren that, when Mr. Darby lay dying, Mr. Champney, his heart full of foreboding for the future without Mr. Darby, said to him, ‘O, Mr. Darby, what of the future?’ The dying man replied, ‘There is no future for the christian but glory!’

How magnificent that is! It meant that the chariot of Israel was still going on. We are not yet at the end, but we are very near it. Beloved, this occasion is to strengthen the brethren in this city and wherever brethren are walking in the truth and representing it in their own places.

They are to go on “firm, immovable, abounding always in the work of the Lord”, 1 Corinthians 15: 58. There is no denying the power in the testimony! You say, ‘Things are very broken, and humbling and weak’. I say, The chariot of Israel is still going on.

We do not want to be like this man—smiting three times only. It is not enough, beloved! We have to put all that we have into the testimony at the present time. Think of the power that could be exerted with all of us, young and old, holding forth the word of life. So it is “an arrow of Jehovah’s deliverance”. God has nothing else for each one of us in the testimony at the present time but deliverance. We are not going to be overwhelmed. We are not going to be blasted out of this scene. God is going to see the chariot of Israel through to the end of the testimony. It is magnificent! “Open the window eastward”; I am looking for Christ to come; the Sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in His wings. It is eastward, beloved, that we have to look. Westward it is all dark.

You will remember what Sir Edward Grey said in 1914 at the outbreak of the first world war—‘The lights are going out all over Europe; they will not be re-kindled in our time’. That was a worldly man’s estimate, politically, of what the future is for this world.

It is dark. The West is going down into decline. But look—the open window eastward; how lovely that is! The prophet only says one word, but how effective—“Shoot”. We need to see that God has brought in an arrow of deliverance for us in the midst of the decay of the christian profession around us. Let us go straight forward then; but, smite upon the earth!

How humbling that is! It reminds me of where I have come from—“Dust thou art: and unto dust shalt thou return”, Genesis 3: 19. That keeps us humble, but ‘The Spirit lifts us up, and makes us sing’ (Hymn 264)—lovely expression! Let us not be lacking in faith, in these dark days, but let us, smite upon the ground constantly, that the enemy may be kept at bay. If Christ is at the door, and coming so soon, let us keep the enemy at bay. In Ephesians 6 you are to stand in the presence of the universal lords of this darkness—and that spirit is all around us—but the Holy Spirit is still resident in the assembly.

In closing I refer to that beautiful passage in Galatians—a very interesting epistle at the present time. I heard Mr. Taylor say that Paul had more trouble with the Galatians than with the Corinthians. We are shocked, and rightly, by what happened at Corinth—the moral degradation that came in there, but legality, turning christianity into a system of bondage and regulation by man, is more difficult and entrenched, and Paul had the greatest difficulty with the Galatians. He must have got them at the end to where they needed to

get back to, that is, to Christ. You think of going back to the old covenant and putting ourselves under law—keeping the sabbath, so that you could not buy something to eat on the sabbath because you must not go into a shop on Saturday! Mr. Darby said that there has been no sabbath since the death of Christ. That is the truth. The Jews have no sabbath. Poor souls, how little they have! They have no temple, no sacrifice, no offering priest. I know they will have it all, in God’s grace, soon, but not now. Yet we think of the few that have come into the assembly, and what outstanding persons they have been.

But God is going on, in spite of all that is against us. He has begun a new work altogether, what Paul calls here “new creation”. We do not want to go back to put ourselves under the ten commandments. People do! They say every day, ‘O Lord, incline our hearts to keep this law’. In christianity God has set us free in freedom. Paul says, “not as without law to God, but as legitimately subject to Christ”, 1 Corinthians 9: 21. Paul says that, and he says here,

“as many as shall walk by this rule”. That is the rule by which I want to walk myself and see the brethren walking—the rule of new creation; not the old, in the letter, but the new, in the Spirit. He adds, “Peace upon them and mercy, and upon the Israel of God”. Quoting the old ministry again, Mr. Darby says that, in the time when God’s earthly people are cast off and until they repent and He has mercy upon them, the assembly occupies the place of the Israel of God. God has never been without His Israel. From the time He had it, back in Exodus, the first corporate book of the Bible—a people gathered out for His name and given the joy of corporate experience—and from then on. God has never lost His Israel. The saints are princes of God, and the chariot which carries that testimony forward is still here. It did not go into heaven and stay there. It is travelling on to the great end. So may our hearts be encouraged.

Paul says, “For the rest let no one trouble me, for I bear in my body the brands of the Lord Jesus”. What an example Paul is for us—the steadfastness of his devotion to Christ. He says in first Corinthians, “Thrice have I been scourged”. The Roman scourging, with metal in knotted thongs, was so severe that the marks of scourging were never lost on a man’s body.

Three times Paul had that experience. In the ‘Synopsis’ Mr. Darby says of this passage that the marks that the devil put upon the back of Paul were transmuted into the beautiful initials of Jesus. What a servant Paul was— branded with the initials of his Master! Countrymen know that—hot irons used to put on a beast the initials of its master. What the devil did in his malice against Paul was transmuted into the beautiful initials on that bondman of his Master whom he loved. The grace of that Master—I feel it in speaking to you—the illimitable grace that gives us the privilege of being here, withdrawn from this wretched world and within reach of the divine voice. “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brethren.

Amen”.

Address at Bristol
9 February 1980