FREE GIFTS
Romans 5:15,17; 2 Corinthians 9:15
These passages mention free gifts; that sounds very attractive as a start. Most of us greatly appreciate a gift, a free gift, and that is what God would give you in the gospel: a free gift. How blessed it is that God would come out to you in the gospel, without demands, without setting things that you are required to do, but on the basis of giving things, giving and securing them for you in the gospel by way of a “free gift in grace”. It is interesting that in this passage there is a footnote to one of the words for gift that says that in this section of Scripture there are actually three different words that are used for gift (see footnote h). It just shows you how the heart of God is disposed towards you, that He is not just going to use one or two words for gift but there are three words for ‘gift’ that He uses. “The act of favour” of God is one of them. How wonderful to think that God is coming out in the gospel and on the ground of offering great blessings that you should receive, and that they should be free for you to receive.
Firstly, the scripture makes reference to “the free gift in grace”. I think Paul is looking forward to what he opens up in verse 17; but how is God speaking to you? He is speaking to you in grace. The whole spirit and attitude of God towards you in the glad tidings is one of grace. Now that is not overlooking the fact that the need for the gospel to be there at all is because you are a sinner. The need for you to receive the gospel at all is because of a fallen nature. I remember a brother once starting his preaching by speaking about unwanted gifts, and that we may receive some of them too. I think it was this passage he was looking at, an unwanted gift from Adam. Do you know that you have an unwanted gift from Adam all the way down from history – a fallen nature? You have a fallen nature. You are a sinner in what you are in your nature; not only in what you do, but in your nature. In your nature, you are set up as contrary to God. And what does God do in the face of seeing every member of the human race with a fallen nature? He says, ‘Here is a free gift in grace. I am going to resolve this matter, this problem of your fallen nature and the problem of your sins, and I am going to do it in My Son, and I am going to do it by way of a free gift, the free gift in grace’. It must be grace. Do you think there is anything you could do to deserve divine blessing? Is there anything you could do to make God pleased with you? God put His people of Israel to the test with that and He gave them the law. He gave them the law in the Old Testament and said, in effect, ‘On you go, you prove that you can do your bit of the covenant and I will give you the blessing’. And what was the position from mankind’s side? It was utter failure from day one! Quite literally from day one, before they even were given the tables of law in their hands, they had fallen into utter wickedness and rejected God (Exod. 32). And if you think that you can achieve anything by your own righteousness, your own goodness, your own effort to fulfil the law, that will be a total failure from day one. In fact, the very presumption to do it would be sinful. You have to take your position as a lost one, as having a fallen condition away from God, and that everything depends on God's side on His free gift in grace.
His free gift in grace, and then, of course, God points out to you immediately that if everything is to be secure, it is not going to be secured in you; it is not going to be secured in anyone else. It is “the free gift in grace, which is by the one man Jesus Christ”. How wonderful it is that God has been able to see a Man walking in perfection in this world, a scene where all these persons are who have been lawless, who have been and are contrary to God. He had a Man walking entirely according to His will, a Man walking in a way that was so pleasing to God because the law was in His heart. The law was not imposed on Jesus like it was imposed on the children of Israel. They were there when law came. No, He was someone who came in and the law was in His heart. Coming into the world He said “Lo, I come to do thy will”, Heb.10:9. Think of what that means! The very motive of the Lord’s being was to do the will of God. Everything He did and every movement of His was with the desire to please God. And it is very beautiful to see in the Scriptures just how they record the movements of Jesus, often in detail. You may have wondered – why are there details of when He stood up, when He sat down and when He stretched out His hand? Every one of these movements was the fulfilment of the will of God; every one of them was attractive to God.
Think of God looking down with pleasure for once on a Man walking according to His will. Think of all Jesus did for men, everything He did to take men out of their negative circumstances, everything He did to present the will of God, especially that He should come in and bring in the divine teaching as to the will of God, to bring in what the heart of God is towards men. How wonderful to think of a Man coming to this earth in this way. How blessed it is! So everything of this free gift in grace, whatever it is, is “by the one man Jesus Christ”, and you are not going to find it anywhere else. Men make their attempts and try to improve things, and they look at the position of mankind that suggests that persons should improve their own lot, and suggest that they should improve their own moral condition, but everything is undercut by that terrible first unwanted gift of a fallen nature which man cannot overcome. But the Lord Jesus has overcome, and the Lord Jesus is the One by whom you can come into the blessing that He has in mind for you. How wonderful it is!
Much of what I have been saying is in earlier passages in Romans, which deal with the question of sins especially, but I had in mind to draw on what we come to in verse 17; it is really why I was drawn to this thought, in the reference to “the free gift of righteousness”. The gospel is about righteousness. Righteousness is what God has in mind; His desire is to see mankind walk before Him in righteousness, walk before Him in a way that is according to God’s mind. Speaking simply, righteousness is doing what is right. Are you doing what is right? All of us are conscious that we have not always done what is right. Why? Because part of that fallen nature is our own fallen will, and we find that our will is to do what we wish rather than what God desires. That has affected mankind all through and it has brought in disaster after disaster; the whole world is heading for disaster. It knows and tries to hide the facts, but the world is heading for disaster. That is the public position; that is what even scientists can tell you. It does not need someone preaching the gospel to say that the world is heading for disaster. And it is heading that way because of human lawlessness, because of will and because of what man has done – especially in what man has done in rejecting God’s Man, His Saviour, the Lord Jesus. The Lord Jesus has come into this scene and that is a wonderful thing too. What did men think about Him? What has been done for Him? They rejected Him. They would not have this Man (Luke 19:14); they wanted another man. They wanted a robber, somebody who was according to their moral standards, not according to God's moral standards (John 18: 40). That is the kind of man we like: Barabbas. As away from God, we will not have Jesus.
Then “they cried out saying, Crucify, crucify him”, John 19:6. Pilate had Jesus crucified, and the title was put on the cross in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, the three major languages of the place and time, which signifies that it covered the whole of mankind (v.20). The people of Israel were chosen of God, but others were brought into blessing, and you and I can be brought in, if we believe – we can belong in that sense to the favoured race. I have been brought into blessing, but we have to learn in our own hearts that a part of our fallen nature results in us actually not wanting Christ. But God is still towards you in grace. God is still towards you in blessing. It is remarkable; when God brought His beloved Son into the world, He was rejected by men and, if I could simply say, God took advantage of that. The Lord Jesus was crucified; He bore the sins of those who trust in Him. It is a wonderful fact. Do you know it? Do you know that when you think of the cross – when you look at the cross - you can say, ‘My sins were borne there’? My sins were borne there, every one, including many that I have forgotten, and ones that I might not think are too sinful. It still cost the Lord Jesus. God knew my sins, and He did not forget any. The Lord Jesus knows my sins better than I do because He bore every one of them for me. And He paid the full cost of what it was according to the will and pleasure of God. Do you know that? Do you know that for yourself?
That is the way in which the Saviour went, because there was a penalty upon me as a sinner, and that penalty is on you as a sinner. It was the penalty of death; the Lord Jesus went that way too. He died for me. The Saviour died for me. Have you said that? ‘Jesus died for me.’ That is a very simple thing to say, but do you appreciate it? Jesus died for me. The hymn puts it so well:
‘The Sinner who believes is free,
Can say, The Saviour died for me;
Can point to the atoning blood
And say, This made my peace with God’.
(Hymn 357)
You can have peace with God. Why? Because the repenting sinner knows that every issue between them and God has been taken up and dealt with in finality at the cross. As repenting, you know that every charge against you is removed. Therefore you can appear before God with this free gift; what a free gift it is, the free gift of righteousness. I love that, the free gift of righteousness. You can appear before God in the total suitability of Jesus because of the free gift of righteousness. You have not earned it; you do not deserve it; it is all in grace; it is all from His side. But you can have it, and you can wear it. Maybe the best robe of Luke 15 is even better than that, but let us think of it, as if this younger son with the best robe on was clothed there, with the free gift of righteousness. WeIl, I do not think there is very much better than that. I know it can be looked at in Christ Himself, but still – think of your position before God as a believer with the free gift of righteousness. The free gift!
If something is a gift, it must be free; but I think the expression “free gift” just shows the liberality of God; how free, how open, it is. God is saying, ‘Here is a gift and it is completely free’. We also, of course, get offers of gifts from time to time, and we look at them and say, ‘Well, there is a catch there; somebody is trying to catch me’. Not this one! From God's side everything is in liberality, a free gift without any catch, without any reserve and without anything that is a demand. However there is one thing that is required of you, and that is repentance. The gospel comes out to you for you to receive, but you must receive it on the basis of repentance. That is, you accept your position before God as a sinner. I accept that I am a sinner before God, and I deserve all the judgment; I deserve the judgment of hell. That is what I deserve, but I accept what God is offering in the glad tidings, the free gift of righteousness. Faith and repentance, how important they are. You have to know the Saviour; you have to know this One and trust Him: trust Him as the One who is the answer to your need, the One who has paid every price. A free gift sounds fine, but somebody had to pay the price and the Lord Jesus was the One who paid the price. You could say that God paid the price too, because this book goes on, “He who, yea, has not spared his own Son”, Rom.8:32. What a cost it was to God. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believes on him may not perish, but have life eternal”, John 3:16. What a cost! Beloved, we will never know how great that cost was. We will never appreciate fully what that cost was, but it was borne entirely by the Lord Jesus. And there is no demand on you as you believe because you are clothed, you have been given this free gift of righteousness to stand before God, and what is the effect? You are going to reign in life. “For if by the offence of the one death reigned by the one, much rather shall those who receive the abundance of grace, and of the free gift of righteousness, reign in life by the one Jesus Christ”. You are not on your own grounds; you stand on divine ground now. The Lord Jesus has secured everything for you and you can reign in life.
Well, there will still be problems in life. There still will be things that will trip you up. And you will still be in the world as a sinner as in one sense the nature is not changed. The flesh remains in you, and you have to work through various exercises that face you and, as the experiences of this epistle to the Romans show as it proceeds, you will find that. But still you do it on the basis that you know what God has given you. He has given you that free gift of righteousness, and because you have that you will be carried through, carried through the exercises. But you need to experience the exercises. Ask God that you should be helped to go through the exercise to secure the new ground in liberty that has gone on as you proceed in this epistle, these glad tidings to the Romans. And, of course, you will have more, God will supply you with more, and not just the free gift of righteousness.
We read in Corinthians, “Thanks be to God for his unspeakable free gift”. Do you know what that is? Do you know that unspeakable free gift? I do not want to define it too exactly, but I think what is mainly in the apostle’s mind is the Holy Spirit. That gift is something that is unspeakable. It is unspeakable; He is a Person who is divine. He is equal in His personal glory with the Father and with the Son. The Spirit is majestic in what He can do. He adorned the heavens (Job.26:13). He came upon Christ and found a place with Him, and this Person, this wonderful Person, can be presented to you as a gift, a free gift which you can receive. You can receive the Holy Spirit in your heart. If you receive the Holy Spirit in your life, He will guide you and help you; He helps you in these soul exercises. In fact, He will be the One who you will discover is ultimately the only help in these exercises that you face in your life. Do you know Him? I trust that you know the Lord Jesus as your Saviour, that you know the free gift of righteousness. But not only that, I trust that you know the Holy Spirit in the reality of His Person. Where does He come from? It is important to see where He has come from. He has come from glory; He has come from where Christ is now. We spoke of Christ on the cross and we referred to His atoning blood, but remember, He has been in the grave, and He has risen, He has ascended, and He is now at the right hand of God. And His first desire, you could say, by way of any kind of administration, was that the Holy Spirit should be poured out. That the Holy Spirit should come to take a place with you shows just how important it was in the Lord's mind that believers should have the Holy Spirit. Without the Holy Spirit, what limitations there would be.
The work of God is wonderful. You can see the work of God operating in Acts 1 before the Holy Spirit came: the work of God was there. The Spirit operated in a certain way in the Old Testament, but what a difference an indwelling Spirit, an unspeakable free gift, makes. How the whole administration of what is for God is bound up in that because “in the power of one Spirit we have all been baptised into one body”, 1 Cor.12:13. There is one body that answers to Christ. Why? Because the Holy Spirit has come from the ascended Man, and the same Spirit that is in Jesus is in you and in your brethren. Because you gather with others; you find that you have those that you walk with, you have those that are your company, and the Holy Spirit is in each one of them. How wonderful a thing that is. The Holy Spirit is in every one who forms part of the vessel of the assembly and the Holy Spirit is ready to be with you as “the Spirit and the bride say, Come”, Rev.22:17. Now the Holy Spirit is ready indeed to have part in the transformation of your body to a body of glory, Rom 8:11.
How wonderful to think of that; how wonderful that there is such an unspeakable free gift. It depends of course on you knowing that first gift, the free gift of righteousness, as having trusted the Saviour and as having repented and as having received it. But then if you have, how wonderful that God would maintain you for His glory by this unspeakable free gift of the Holy Spirit. I trust you know these things. Believers love the gospel because they may very well have heard the same thing gone over time and again, but how attractive it is to hear about the wonders of the Saviour and the blessedness of what is there in the Spirit of God. May we be encouraged. If you have not trusted, trust now. If you do not have the Spirit, you can ask for the Spirit and you will be given the Spirit as you ask. That is one thing that we are told, that the Father will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask (Luke 11:13); you can be absolutely assured of that. How wonderful it is.
May we all be increased in our appreciation of the blessedness of all that is in the divine mind for us, for His name’s sake.
Preaching of the gospel, Grangemouth
8 January 2023
David C Brown
GLORY THE ANSWER TO SUFFERING
Luke 24:25, 26, 45-47; 1 Peter 1:10,11;
All of the passages I have read make the same point – they make a connection between the sufferings of the Lord Jesus and His glory. You may also have noticed that the first four verses of the hymn we sang (Hymn 302) do the same – part of each verse is about the sufferings of the Lord Jesus, and also about His glory. I am especially interested in the second verse, which refers to ‘answering glory’ – ‘Told in answ’ring glory now’. It raises an interesting question into which any of us could enquire. If we were to mention any of the sufferings of the Lord Jesus, would we be able to identify an answering glory? Is it the case, as the hymn-writer believed, that each of the many aspects of the Lord’s sufferings has such an answer? I commend the enquiry to our interest.
In speaking about the sufferings of the Lord Jesus, I feel immediately the acute need of care, because as Peter says, they belong to the Christ. It is easy, when we talk to somebody about some adverse experience they have had, to seem to adopt their experience, as if we can understand it because we have had, or could have had, an experience like it. But we cannot do that with the sufferings of Jesus. They belong to the Christ. The same is true of the answering glories; the Lord says: “Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things and to enter into his glory?”. That is not just a general idea of glory, but His glory. You might say the glory is His because the sufferings were His. One answers to the other: He owns or possesses them both.
Now we are familiar with the fact that there were sufferings that the Lord Jesus entered into that we are not called upon to have any part in: they are not for us to enter upon. We might speak of some of these in due course. There are other characters or orders of suffering that believers are called upon to face, but we could not enter into those to the extent that He did. And our sufferings could not be said to have ‘answering glories’ in the same way as His do. Paul says: “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time” – that is a reference to our sufferings – “are not worthy to be compared with the coming glory”, Rom.8:18. I do not think you could say that about the sufferings of Christ. There is a correspondence between what He entered into in His sufferings and the glory that has followed. Our sufferings are for our education and formation, and many are disciplinary or corrective. We cannot say that about any of the sufferings of Christ. It could be said that He “learned obedience from the things that he suffered” (Heb.5:8), but that does not mean to say that He learned to obey. It is an important aspect of His priestly service to us that He supports us in things that He has known Himself. He has come into a position and relationship to which obedience belonged, so that He can have sympathy and compassion with us in the things that we suffer in our circumstances. Obedience did not apply to the condition in which He was before the incarnation, but He came into a life here in which He knew what it was to obey.
These things are very deep. Peter says in the preaching in Acts 3 that “God has thus fulfilled what he had announced beforehand by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ should suffer”, Acts 3:18. The Lord Jesus says here in Luke 24; “Ought not the Christ to have suffered”, implying that there was a need that He should suffer. He entered into a pathway of suffering leading to the cross in order to fulfil the counsels and purposes of God. And it is for that reason that the hymn-writer is right to say that these sufferings have an answering glory. That cannot be said about the sufferings we experience, for as the apostle Paul says they are not to be compared to the coming glory. So we must speak about the Lord’s sufferings with the utmost care, because they involve depths into which we cannot see and may not go.
If we were to try to compare our sufferings with His, I think we would soon be found out. Think of the suffering of reproach. The Lord Jesus bore reproach – it was one of the categories of His sufferings, that He suffered reproach. So do the people of God. I am not talking about the reproach we have brought upon ourselves – there is plenty of that – but the reproach of the Christ. We enter into that. Did He ever, ever flinch from reproach? Did He ever seek a different way? Was He ever embarrassed to be true to His Father? We only have to look honestly at the way we enter into these things to see that we could never compare ourselves, and what we go through, with the sufferings of Christ.
The hymn that we sang is interesting. Its subject is the ‘wondrous story of the cross’. But the hymn does not give us the complete story of the cross. It certainly does not give us the complete story of the sufferings of Jesus. Indeed, you would struggle to find a passage of scripture in which the full scope of the sufferings of Jesus could be found. The hymn-writer concentrates on the sufferings of the cross, but although she covers three or four distinct aspects of the sufferings of Christ, she is unable in a few verses to cover them all. The Lord’s life of suffering began at birth. He was an outcast, as Mr Darby says in his poem ‘The Man of Sorrows’: ‘O ever homeless Stranger... an outcast in the manger’. If it is possible for a small baby to suffer, He was such a Baby. His parents tried within the resources that were available to minister to His comfort, but in the limited circumstances it was hardly possible. Before He had left the infant stage of life, the first attempt to kill Him was made. Think of that! He was a refugee from one that sought to kill Him. He grew up in a life of obscurity with no one around Him to understand. A life that was devoted to the will and work of God in a way beyond the understanding of those around Him. “Did ye not know that I ought to be occupied in my Father's business?”, Luke 2:49. We perhaps know something of the pressure of not being able to find anyone who understands what we are doing, why we are doing things. Other than the Father Himself, He had no one to talk to or confide in that could understand.
As far as the people around Him were concerned, that was the life of Jesus. He had His outlet of course to the Father. But He was surrounded by people who, I think, were mistrustful and suspicious and certainly not understanding. He came out in public service and they tried to kill Him after His first preaching. That is how the first preaching ended, with an attempt on His life. They took Him to the brow of the hill on which their city was built and would have thrown Him down the precipice (Luke 4:29). What a way to treat a preacher, who on their own admission had words of grace coming out of His mouth. And it was not the last attempt that was made on His life. It says they took up stones that they might cast them at Him (John 8:59). It also says that the Pharisees and scribes took counsel about how they might destroy Him (Matt.12:14). This was in the background all the time.
We do not read that anyone in His company ever spoke in His defence. The man in John 9 and the thief on the cross are possibly the only men who are recorded as speaking up for Him. The officers tackled Peter once, and he gave an answer out of self-interest; it was not true what he said (Matt. 26:70-75). He was thinking more about how to get out of trouble himself than what was due to the Lord he followed. And then of course Jesus was surrounded by the world of sin. Everywhere He looked He would see people sinning, people deciding what they would do not by reference to what was right or wrong, but by whether they wanted to do it, disregarding the will and mind and the standards of God. They would even ask Him to get involved in their quarrels, try to get Him to impose an unrighteous solution on their problems.
Then you think of all the people who came to Him, people who were ill and who were possessed by demons. How close He came to Satan’s own working. Satan himself came to tempt Him. Think of what He took upon Himself. Mr Darby says: ‘He bore in His spirit what He took away in His power, for all was the fruit of sin in man’1. Every person He touched, He suffered for. Think of that woman in John 8, taken in adultery. She does speak, but not to make a confession. I believe she was saved and that she was repentant, but she does not say so. The Lord Jesus frees her from condemnation, He offers to justify her, He acted as her surety, knowing that it would cost Him the cross and the judgment of God. I do not think she had any true understanding of what her course and her sinful act meant. But He did. She never found out, but He did. Think of His path of suffering every step of the way.
Then we come to Gethsemane, and Satan returns, not now with temptations and the allurements of the world, and a place in it, but with the terror of death. The attack focused on the Lord’s devotion to the will of God. If He could be turned aside, even by a hair’s breadth, we would have been lost. He suffered, being tempted. Think of that: “his sweat became as great drops of blood, falling down upon the earth”, Luke 22:44. He must devote Himself to the will of God, cost what it might. And it cost suffering after suffering after suffering.
As we come now to consider the cross, there is an article of Mr Stoney’s about Psalm 222. We often turn to Psalm 22 for some account of the sufferings of Jesus, because He quoted it on the cross. Mr Stoney pointed out that the sufferings of Jesus in that psalm take seven different forms. The first suffering mentioned – that of the forsaking – although not first in time, was the greatest. It was greater than all the others that follow, as I shall seek to show. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (v.1). The second one was reproach. We might say, ‘that is our lot as well’. But think of the Lord Jesus in that place of reproach. He says: “Reproach hath broken my heart.” Ps.69:20. That is how deeply He felt. “The reproaches of them that reproach thee have fallen upon me”, Ps.69:9. I will touch on that again in a moment. But they reproached God through Him. When He said “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34), that is what He was speaking about firstly, I think. They had dishonoured God, like these husbandmen who murdered the son of the owner of the vineyard.
Then Psalm 22:12 speaks about the bulls of Bashan. Mr Stoney says that this refers to the religious council of the Pharisees. Anyone familiar with farming would know the pride a farmer takes in his bull. There was pride of position there, and with it power to enforce that position; that is what we see with the Jews. The man in John 9 is unusual because he faces up to the power of those bulls, something that Peter did not like to do. It was these Jews who demanded that He should be crucified. Their word, it says, and the words of the chief priests, prevailed. That was the bulls. They were against Him, the religious authorities demanding His crucifixion. Then hear them later at the cross: “He saved others, himself he cannot save”, Matt.27:42. The council members say that. “He trusted upon God; let him save him now if he will have him”, said the priests (v.43). The Pharisees and the chief priests said: “the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation”, John 11:48. That is what they were thinking about: ‘our place’. Those are the bulls, and they were against Christ.
Then the fourth aspect of suffering was weakness. He was crucified in weakness. There we have an example of an answering glory – “if indeed he has been crucified in weakness, yet he lives by God's power”, 2 Cor.13:4. It is not that He was weakened by the work He did, we cannot say that. But nevertheless the position of His being impaled on the cross is a position of weakness. He says, “all my bones are out of joint”, Ps.22:14. Think of the physical extremity which Jesus suffered as He faced these awful hours! Then He speaks about the dogs, the Romans. They took His clothes, they pierced His hands and His feet. Think of their uncivilised behaviour, the denial of the very principles that the Romans prided themselves in: “his judgement has been taken away”, Acts 8:33. Then we have the power of Satan himself, Ps.22:20. He was present at the cross, seeking to turn the Lord Jesus out of the pathway of the will of God, and to deny you your salvation so that your eternal destruction would be certain. Everything hung, beloved friend, on the Lord’s suffering. Then it says, He was delivered from the horns of the buffaloes. That is from death itself. He felt the article of death. It was among the most acute of His sufferings; but He had to go that way. It was not exactly that He was afraid, but to Him death was such an unnatural thing. He would go that way as bearing the penalty of death, the wages of sin, and having borne the judgment that was due. It was that especially that He bore anticipatively in His spirit in Gethsemane.
Think of that – seven aspects of suffering, but even that does not account for everything. He went that way alone – the hymn says that: “On that cross, alone …”. It is the next verse of the hymn that is about the forsaking by God. But He was also forsaken first by His friends, His companions. The scripture says: “And all left him and fled”, Mark 14:50. They all forsook Him. Some of them were with Him at the cross, but by no means all. Peter was not there. Would I have been? They all forsook Him and fled. You might say that was a sign of their weakness. If weakness is a form of suffering, the disciples were not good at sustaining it. Faced with what appeared to be overwhelming circumstances, they left, rather than face the sufferings. If you read Psalm 88, which is about the sufferings of Jesus, it says: “Lover and associate hast thou put far from me”, Ps. 88:18. That psalm is not about the weakness of His companions who turned and fled, but the psalmist is acknowledging that God was over that and that the Lord Jesus, in the will of God, was denied any company or consolation as He entered into these sufferings. He went alone. None could follow, of course, but none did. “I looked for … comforters, but I found none”, Ps.69:20.
What a mighty work it was. I am now speaking of the part of that work that led up to the hours of darkness - the whole matter from His arrest, you might say, through to that point at which darkness fell. In that time He was alone. No-one spoke before Pilate in His defence; no-one was asked to. There was apparently no-one there who might have done so.
“Thou soughtest for compassion –
Some heart Thy grief to know,
To watch Thine hour of passion –
For comforters in woe:
No eye was found to pity –
No heart to bear Thy woe;
But shame, and scorn, and spitting –
None cared Thy name to know.”
(J N Darby: The Man of Sorrows)
And it was in God’s ordering that it was so; He submitted to it as a matter of obedience, so that the mighty work, and all that was associated with it including the offering of Himself to God, should be His own work, and His own work alone. There was no-one, no suggestion of any help. What He did for you, He did alone.
Now, I come back to what the Lord Jesus then said, on the cross. There are a number of statements that He made at the cross, some of them very comforting to particular individuals. But He prays three times: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”; “My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?”; and “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit”. These three prayers are uttered, and there was no manifest answer. When the Lord Jesus speaks of being forsaken, what He means is that, for a time, there was no communion between Him and God. In the darkness, He was bearing the wrath of God against sin. Now we cannot speak of that being so up to that point of darkness, or after it ended. The forsaking is a matter that I believe was concentrated into these three hours. We should consider the way He speaks to God. In the first and third of those references I made, He addresses God as His Father. He had been in constant communion with the Father, although we are told very little of what passed between them. There were occasions in the Lord’s pathway when there was a public demonstration of an answer – in John 12, the Lord Jesus speaks and there came a sound out of heaven: “I both have glorified and will glorify it again”, John 12:28. That is a public answer. I only say that because I want to be very careful here, and simply to draw to attention that there was no public answer to these three utterances of Christ on the cross. I think that the period in which there was no communion is clearly defined by those hours of darkness, and by the way He speaks to His God, rather than to the Father.
As Mr Taylor pointed out – and he has been misinterpreted because people assumed he was referring to the quotation from the psalm, but he was not – those two prayers to the Father received no public answer. Mr Taylor says that ‘there was no immediate manifest answer … the answers are in resurrection’.3 The reason is that the Lord Jesus was going alone. The prayer of the Lord Jesus was public, but there was no public answer from the Father. The Lord Jesus was there alone. He was on that cross alone. Think of what it cost the Lord Jesus to speak to His Father, and for there to be no public answer. Think for a moment how you would feel. And remember that His feelings are infinitely greater than yours.
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34), He says. I do not think He was referring, principally and immediately, to the way they had treated Him, the brutality He suffered, the contempt and disregard in which they held Him. No, the Father was the Husbandman, He had expected His Son to be treated with respect, as His Son; and the fact that they cast Him out and killed Him was a sin against the Father. And such were the inward feelings of the Lord Jesus, suffering alone as He was, that He was moved to pray for their forgiveness. What a wonderful thing that is, that the sufferings of the Lord Jesus never turned Him aside, never tainted His spirit. Mr Darby says in his poem:
“Thy love by ill untainted,
To death Thy feet did bear.”
(Hymn 190)
What a course, what a path, He took! What answering glories there are! Think of that. As the scripture says, He was crucified in weakness, but He lives by God’s power. He was alone, but now He is in the midst of His brethren. He was denied, but now He is honoured, crowned with glory and honour. Death sought to claim Him, but He is risen and glorified. Think of the offices that the Lord Jesus has. He passed this way, but He is now a great high priest. Think of that – He is a priest for ever, He is constituted a priest for ever. He has the priesthood unchangeable. The glories that He has been given will never fade. No-one else will ever qualify for these glories. God will never take any of them away. And I commend to the brethren that they concentrate on what these glories are, and see in them an answer to His sufferings.
Now I want to refer to these passages in Matthew’s gospel in order to leave us with something to think about for ourselves. As I said, all these passages present the two sides – His suffering and His glory. In chapter 21, the parable of the husbandmen presents His sufferings. He came on the Father’s behalf, on God’s behalf, and because He was coming to assert God’s claim over people who wanted to deny it, they cast Him out of the vineyard and killed Him. Hymn 302 speaks of “Every mark of dark dishonour”. You might say, ‘These people have disqualified themselves for ever from God’s face’. Well, let us see what happens. “A king” it says, “made a wedding feast for his son”. That son is the man that they killed. The answering glory to what these husbandmen did was a wedding feast for his son. It is God’s purpose, in the present day, to honour Christ. And He will not allow that to be qualified, or denied, or overlooked in any way. God’s imperative in the present time is to honour the One who suffered for Him. He came, as I said, to assert God’s claim upon things that were undoubtedly God’s. God, as it were, owes Him glory, which He hastens to confer.
The king made a wedding feast for his son. Who did He invite? The husbandmen. They were the first people to get an invitation to this wedding feast. Think of the grace of that. Think of Peter’s first preaching: he says: “I know ye did it in ignorance, as also your rulers”, Acts 3:17. Peter is giving out invitations to the wedding feast. And the people who took responsibility in the council, the Sanhedrim, declined them. We then go down through the parable that we are familiar with, and we come to people like us who have been brought in from the thoroughfares. Beloved, we would not have had an invitation of that kind if the Lord Jesus had not first suffered, as I have been saying. And the purpose of the invitation is not your relief, or to give you a nice day, but to honour Christ. That is its sole purpose. You have been called in God’s grace – no merit and no right – to participate in the exaltation of Christ. And if we understood more fully why God feels it necessary to have Him exalted in that way, which is because He suffered as He did, we would accept the grace in which the invitation is given and fill out the part that God has in mind for us.
Now we find here a man who did not see it like that. What you observe is that when some people are invited to a wedding, they feel it is an opportunity to express themselves, and maybe to dress themselves in a way that people will remember. That is what this man did. I do not think he came in rags, but he had his own idea about what he should wear at this wedding, and it did not exalt Christ. It might have been very good and fine and expensive, but it was not for the exaltation of Christ, and it offended the King, understandably. What I bring out of this, beloved, is that we need to think this through. The Lord Jesus has suffered on God’s account and God has an answering glory to those sufferings in which you and I have been called in grace to have a part. It is not about me, it is not about my identity, it is not about any attention-seeking for me, it is about the exaltation of the suffering One. That is what it is for. It is what we are called to. What a wonderful thing it is to accept God’s grace, and to be in that honouring company. “We see Jesus”, Paul says “crowned with glory and honour”, Heb. 2:9. Mr. Taylor has a fine article in ministry, “Christ crowned by the Father and by the saints.”4
I think we could also say that the servants had already become objects of that grace. They understood what it was to honour Christ. They understood well enough to be able to go out and find others to come in and add to that honour and glory. They encountered the very same sufferings as the son himself had suffered. You only have to compare verse 6 of chapter 22 with verse 39 of chapter 21. Paul says: “We are Christ’s joint heirs”, Rom.8:17. That is a wonderful thing. What right have we to that? What right to enter into these things, to share what falls to Him as His inheritance? What have we done to deserve that? It is pure grace. Paul also says: “if indeed we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him”, Rom.8:17. I believe that those who have been touched by that grace that has brought them into this great matter of honouring Christ are the ones who are prepared to stand for Him in the world where that reproach remains.
Well, I trust we will think about that, beloved. We cannot expect honour in the world. It is not the place for it. Someone I knew said that they could not accept an honour in a world where their Lord has so little. And that is what we are called to. We are called to it on the principle of grace. We are called to it on the basis of what we have arrived at in our affections for the One who suffered and died that we might be saved from eternal destruction and loss.
May these thoughts be for our encouragement.
Aberdeen, Scotland
25 February 2023
D Andrew Burr
Editor’s note: there was a typographical error in the May edition of Notes of Ministry. On page 7, in the paragraph beginning “That is what you have….”, the word ‘partners’ was omitted from the end of the second sentence.
Edited and published monthly by Alistair Brown and Paul Martin
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