“HE WHO OPENS”
J. McKay
Luke 24: 27–35; 1 Kings 10: 1–7 (first clause) Revelation 3: 7, 12, 13
These scriptures, dear brethren, may serve to bring out further the truth as to the supremacy of Christ. How illuminating it is to realise that the Person who has won your affections is the One who will finally assert His own supremacy in view of concluding everything for the pleasure and glory of
God. God began in christianity with the supremacy of Jesus made Lord and Christ. God will conclude things in Him. I suppose there is no book in the whole canon of Scripture which brings out the supremacy of Christ more than the book of Revelation, the wonderful way in which everything according to God is concluded with the assertion in authority and power of the supremacy of the Man in whom everything centres for God. So as His supremacy marked the beginning it is also going to mark the end.
Now what I particularly want to draw attention to in this passage in Revelation 3 is the little phrase, descriptive of the Lord Jesus, “He who opens”; not to occupy you exactly with what is opened, but to attract us freshly to the Person through whom disclosures are to come at the end of the dispensation. Whilst from one point of view the truth is all out the word of God was completed through the Lord’s servant the apostle Paul—nevertheless on our side there is need of great expansion in the experience of that truth, and it involves the consistent, current service of Christ in the way that He alone can open things up to us. So I speak of Him as “He who opens”.
Revelation 19 is majestic in the way it shows the supremacy of Christ in regard of the subjugation of every alien force. One on a white horse called Faithful and True, having a name written which no one knows. How great Christ is! Mr. Taylor spoke of that name written as involving what is inscrutable in the Person of the Lord Jesus. Remember that there is that in Christ which will always be beyond us. The greatness of who He is remains unalterable, unchanged by the passage of time; it will remain eternally—the greatness of the Person of the Lord Jesus. But then He has another name written on His garments and on His thigh, the place of strength—King of kings and Lord of lords. The very Person whom we have come to know in our experience is the One who in that day will take issue with the great enemies that will then be extant, and the beast and the false prophet will be taken first and dealt with. What irony is in that, that the commanders-in-chief of Satan’s forces will be dealt with first in that great final conflict, and what will emerge is the supremacy of Christ.
So He is supreme; that is conclusive. He has gained the mastery over every evil force. He has already done that; He has been into death. He presents Himself earlier in the book as having the keys of death and of hades (Revelation 1: 18). How assuring that is! Are you under pressure, dear brother, or sister? Do matters of adversity seem, as far as you are concerned, to be out of control? Be assured there is a Man who is supreme in regard of the forces of evil; the same One who is to be supreme in your affections, the Person of the Lord Jesus. A wonderful truth governing the dispensation is that a Man has gained mastery over Satan. So things are controlled now for the saints; we are not to be downcast or overwhelmed by the pressure; but rather sustained as in the knowledge of the One who has the keys of death and of hades. So that although Satan came with all power and force against the Lord Jesus, what is allowed to come against the saints now is controlled. God’s infinitely wise hand permits things to happen for discipline, for teaching, and instruction, in view of the results that He has in mind being reached in His people. All is now controlled by the One who is supreme.
Those two in Luke 24 were going away from the divine centre, for the moment discouraged, and together in their discouragement. Do not let us get together on those lines, dear brethren.
It is good to be together in what is positive, but let us not get together on lines of discouragement. They were moving further and further away. We have referred to some who have diverted; they are still our brethren. We still have obligations in relation to them and should still have intense interest in them. What comes out in this passage is the Lord’s deep interest in two persons who for the moment were not on the main line. How far He was prepared to go! Of course, He can go where we cannot go, but I believe we learn through this incident the value the Lord places on His own work, even in persons who for the moment may be wayward. “He made as though he would go farther”, but “they constrained him”. That is very interesting; two persons for the moment not in Jerusalem, off-centre we may say, and yet the Lord is constrained by these persons. See the value He placed upon them, the way He was prepared, for the moment, to tarry with them in view of their being gained. I believe this is the way that what is of God in persons will be revived, as freshly they come to it in the experience of their souls that Jesus is supreme. He drew near to them and “interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself”. Later on they say, “He opened the scriptures to us”, and later, as to the company, “He opened their understanding to understand the scriptures” (Luke 24: 45). Oh that we might get that kind of understanding of the Scriptures! What sort of understanding have we of the word of God?
How dependent we need to be as to its use. Mr. Darby stressed that we need to keep the word and the Spirit together (Coll. Wrtgs. (N.S. Vol. 4, p.63). We need, too, the touch of Christ in view of the Scriptures becoming the word of God to us.
So the Lord gives them a touch from Himself. Oh that we may yet see persons who are within range of us, dear brethren, get a touch that will bring them back. I think we should be very thankful for those who are within range, recoverable, those who have not committed themselves to the great current of apostasy that is running in the world or to what is out of keeping with the name of Christ religiously. Such persons may yet respond with an alacrity that may surprise us to a touch from Christ. The Lord took the house-father’s place and made Himself known to them. Then they retrace their steps to Jerusalem, coming back into the area where His headship would be the normal experience. You see, He did not stay with them in that far-away place. It may be that you need to make a move; it may be that you need to take a journey spiritually to get back into the area where the headship of Christ is a normal and known experience. The way I think it will be reached is by a fresh assertion in your own soul of the supremacy of Him who is prepared to open things up to you.
In 1 Kings 10 we have typically a person who is prepared to make a journey to reach Christ. It is important that we get a view of Christ, not simply on His own, but as the centre of the divine system. Solomon had a wonderful order of things under his hand. Had he travelled to where the queen of Sheba was she might have apprehended his wisdom, she might have got the answers to her questions, but it would not have had the same effect on her as the view she had of the system of things of which Christ, in type, was the centre. So she undertakes this journey and comes to prove Solomon with enigmas, hard questions. Has anyone here got an enigma—something that is perplexing you? You find that there is not really an obvious answer to it, and perhaps you have conversed with this one and that one—for we tend first to look to men for the answer, perhaps to those who may be near to us, or to those whom we think would give us the sort of answer we would prefer to hear. How ready the flesh is to exploit any situation! As a circumstance confronts you which is perplexing, take it to Christ. The Lord is available for the explanation of hard questions. The queen of Sheba came with all this wealth, and with her problems, into the presence of Solomon, type of Christ in His position of unchallenged supremacy, and available in view of the opening up of the answers to questions which none other could solve.
I believe it to be a point of experience, valuable beyond anything else, when we find that there is only one Person to whom we can turn, and that is Christ. We are thankful for the brethren; we would not be without them; to look round upon them today is to see the evidence of what God has done, and we thank Him for it; but we need to come to the point, as helped of the Spirit, where our only resource is Christ; this will have a marked effect on our outlook. The queen of Sheba is affected not only by Solomon but by the greatness of the system over which he presides. She saw his wisdom, the house that he had built, the food of his table, the deportment of his servants, the order of service of his attendants and their apparel, his cupbearers, and his ascent by which he went up to the house of Jehovah, and there was no more spirit in her.
This will deliver us from the appeal of every other system. The Spirit would give us a glimpse of God’s world. Man’s world is offering its attractions; how tempting, and not only for young persons (let us not lay the burdens too heavily upon them); it is making its bid for those who are older too. Persons who are secure are persons who have an apprehension of a realm where Christ’s supremacy is unchallenged and where there is no problem too hard to solve. The realm of the assembly is thus a place where questions can be answered. Why then do exercises drag on? Why is it that matters become extended? Is it, perhaps, that the needed state of subjection is lacking so that when the answer comes we are slow to submit ourselves to it? The power of Christ is just as great today as it will be in the day to come. His greatness remains as it was at the beginning, as it will be at the end; but the wonder of it is that the experience of it is available even now to persons who come into the assembly in a spirit of subjection.
So the Lord addresses Himself in Revelation 3, as we have been taught, to a wonderful condition of things developed under the hand of the Spirit. Philadelphia represents a place where the Lord is loved. Thank God for the revival amongst us of assembly affection for Christ. He says, “Thou hast a little power ... and hast not denied my name”, and “hast kept the word of my patience”. The Lord was affected by what existed in the church at Philadelphia.
We must be careful not to claim things, dear brethren, but let us be concerned to provide something that affects the Lord. The way He presents Himself indicates the pleasure He finds in what is for Him in Philadelphia. In spite of all the departure—think of the dislocation that the addresses to the other churches bring into view, think of the inroads of Satan—what comes out here is that the Lord is supreme and stands directly in relation to a state of things that is pleasing to Him.
Whatever comes in publicly cannot alter this fact that the Lord is supreme. That supremacy is to be proved in its detail, dear brethren, in a sphere that is suited to Him. So He says, ‘These things saith the holy, the true; He that has the key of David, He who opens, and no one shall shut’. The key of David is a wonderful suggestion. He is able to open up precious positive truth to us in this wonderful realm where what is for God’s pleasure is in view. The Lord would present Himself to us as having the key of David still! He is prepared to open things in a fresh and a vital sense to us. How thankful we are for what has gone before. You will remember that Isaac in Genesis 26 dug again the wells that his father had dug. Let us make sure that those wells are all dug. Let us make sure that the ministries on our bookshelves are valued and that the earth is removed and the water supply is flowing through the wells that our fathers have dug. Then as he proceeds Isaac digs other wells and he finds that there is additional experience, what is fresh.
I believe we are in the time when we should be enlarged as to what may be additional in the spiritual realm. Our testimony is not simply to be repetitive. We are to retain all that has gone before, particularly the principles that have been stood for, principles that have been fought for, battles that have been fought and won. We are to carry all that forward; but there is also to be what is fresh. We are not simply going over old ground in that sense, but we are in the presence of what is divinely fresh and living. The word is Rehoboth—“Jehovah has made room for us”, Genesis 26: 22. What is the secret of this? It is the supremacy of Christ as “He who opens”, the One who does it, the One through whom the revelation of God has come. How much has come through Jesus, and He is the One who will open up things freshly to us in the divine realm.
So this section is like the divine investiture of the saints. The Lord says, “He that overcomes ... I will write upon him”. Think of that kind of material that He writes on. The first material God wrote on was tables of stone—hard, permanent no doubt, but hard and unresponsive. What God is writing on now is sensitive and responsive to Himself. “I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which comes down out of heaven, from my God, and my new name”. What is personal to Christ is prominent. It shows a capacity in the saints which is wonderful, that they are able to receive what belongs to Christ. It shows close correspondence between Him and them that they can receive those impressions, not in a passing or transient sense, but as written upon them. Let us then be impressionable in the assembly. As we follow up what He brings in we find that the divine writing is proceeding under the hand of the One who is able to make such wonderful disclosures to us. May we see that the One who will yet conclude everything for God is prepared to serve us thus even in these last days. May He help us, for His name’s sake.
Address at Richmond
24 July 1976