A ROCK, A TOWER AND A CITY

Andrew Mutton

Exodus 33: 21; Proverbs 18: 10; Hebrews 11: 13-16

I would like to speak about three things, a rock, a tower and a city – these three things can give you the greatest stability. If you walk into a room full of people, say you are five minutes late for a three day meeting, fellowship meeting, or a big conference, as you walk in everyone who is sitting down can probably see at least twenty chairs you could sit on, and as you walk in the door, you cannot even see one! Someone will say, there is one right up here on the platform, but you think, I do not really want to walk all the way up there. Someone else will say, there is one over here, and it is in a row of people you do not know very well. Then someone you know says, why do you not just come and sit here by me. That is why I have started with this scripture because the glad tidings gives you stability, and it gives it to you in a way that draws you so near to the God whose glad tidings they are, that you could not be nearer. It makes you feel at home. The words that we have read in Exodus are, “Behold, there is a place by me”. You might think that God is up there in heaven and He looks down here: He has a word for me tonight and He wants to speak to me, but He is up there and I am down here. He is either going to tell me to go somewhere else or to travel a distance, or He is going to tell me of a promise that is some way off. But, you know, the God who announces these glad tidings says to you “there is a place by me”. What is that place like? What does it feel like? Would you feel as comfortable as in the situation I described at the beginning? Is it a place that you can fill without second thought? Is it a place that is easy to reach? The answers to all these questions can be difficult, but I can tell you one thing, it is a place that God wants you to fill – “there is a place by me”. As He announces His glad tidings it is to draw you, dear friend, into the closest relationship with God Himself, draw you in to a place where you can know the full privilege and the full force and atmosphere of the love of God – “a place by me”. You cannot get there in your own strength, however fast you might be able to run, or however high you might think you can jump or how far you can travel, you cannot get to that place in your own strength, and thus the second part of the verse says, “there shalt thou stand on the rock”.

That is the first thing that I want to speak of, the rock on which you stand to find your place near to God. What does that rock refer to? We spoke in the reading of scriptures that are hard to interpret, but I can tell you – this is one of the easiest! What do you think or who do you think that rock is, on which you can stand to find your place near God? I tell you, it is Jesus. Why do you need a rock on which to stand? Because if you were to stand there in your own strength, firstly God could not even look at you because you would be in your sins, and secondly, you would be like the man who built His house on the sands, and the storms would come and at the first threat of water you would be washed away because your foundation would not be secure. There is a rock on which you have to stand, on which your faith and hope has to be firmly founded before you can come into this place beside God. I would that everyone here knew what it is to stand on the rock of knowing Jesus as their Saviour, and of trusting in His precious work. It is simple in the glad tidings as God says to you, here is the rock, place your trust and faith in Him, here is His work, look upon it, is it sufficient for you? Of course it is. It is sufficient for a holy God to look upon. He is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity; He cannot look upon you if you stand in that place without the work of Jesus. Without the precious blood of Jesus having washed you from your sins, how can you stand in a place like this? “There is a place by me”. God does not just let any one in, but He has chosen, and let us just concentrate on the few of us here, He has chosen that you and I should have the opportunity of filling that place that is near to Him. What a God you have. Often in the glad tidings, we use it as an embracive call, What a God we have! And indeed we have, but I can tell you, what a God you have, because He says to you, “there is a place by me”. It is very individual, the glad tidings are individual; find the rock on which you can place your faith and trust. You know how transient the things in the world are that you may place your trust on. There are those in this room who know how easily circumstances, employment, health and conditions and all these things that we have to do with change. How transient they are, how quickly they can be taken away and how easily they change and change totally. There is One who never changes, One who places you on a rock that will never falter. Some in this room know what it is to be in a place where the rocks move, where the greatest sections of rock which lie across the globe move, and they can cause whole cities and areas of the earth to shake and move. Jesus is not like that. This is one rock which will never move. This is something, the like of which you will never have had in your life before, and that is why God has chosen Jesus to be the foundation on which your faith can be laid. Why would He choose someone or something that is likely to move in a few days or years time? Why would He do that? He has a place for you, He wants you to fill it, He never wants you to leave it. He wants you to place your trust and faith in the blood and work of our Lord Jesus Christ. I trust everyone here has done that. What a shame it would be for even the youngest one here, having been in several preachings, (and as you go up through our ages, how many more, hundreds and thousands of preachings have we listened to), what sadness that God, throughout all those preachings, has been calling to you and saying, “Behold, there is a place by me” and you have ignored that call. Take up that place, dear friend, place your trust in Christ, know what it is to place your feet on the rock of the work of Jesus and trust in Him forever.

Others will tell me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that you will not know anything of the tower unless you have placed your feet on the rock. You have got to know the rock first. If you do not know what it is to have your faith in Jesus, if you do not know what it is to have your sins forgiven and your acceptance before God, you will not come to the tower. If you have been washed in that precious blood, you can know what it is to run in to a strong tower. It says, “The name of Jehovah is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe”. If you have not had to do with Jesus, do you think you can call yourself righteous? Scripture puts us straight immediately as to that, “There is not a righteous man, not even one”, Rom. 3: 10. Those ideas can be banished from our heads, our minds and our thoughts immediately, there is not one who is righteous. Another scripture says, “all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags”, Isa 64: 6. The place by the side of Jehovah, that place that you can know because He loves you so much that He wants to bless you in all the fulness of the blessing that only God can give, that place is yours if you put your trust in the righteousness of Jesus. He has established it in going to the cross and suffering and dying there, and then as you place your trust in that work, and you take on the righteousness of a Man who is heaven, One who has risen and been accepted up into heaven, you then are righteous because He is righteous. Thus you can run into this tower, the tower that is the “name of Jehovah … the righteous runneth into it, and is safe”. As you find your life here, as you find your way, the lot of the believer and of a Christian may be a little bit difficult. It may be that you face opposition, indeed it would be strange if you did not face opposition if you were here as one confessing the name of Christ, but as you face that opposition or in some small measure what the Lord Himself faced when He was here, the rejection and casting out by men, you are able to find that, “the name of Jehovah is a strong tower”. We do not use this word Jehovah so much these days, this was in the Old Testament times, but let us use the name of Jesus. Let us put in the name of Jesus here, that the name of Jesus is a strong tower. Confess it, dear friend. There is nothing to prove your faith like confessing the Name of Jesus. It is relatively easily, I speak simply, to sit in your chair here, or even to go home and to place your faith and trust in Jesus, and many of us would have to bow our heads at being silent Christians or being secret disciples, but to confess the Name of Jesus in a public way, what a thing that is! You have already done it to some degree, the fact that you came in from a day like this and walked in to hear the gospel, that is confessing the Name of Jesus, because it means that you want to hear about Him. Is that why you came to the glad tidings? Why did you come to the preaching? Because you want to hear about Jesus? I may preach Him very poorly, but God will preach Jesus in a way that you will never have heard before. The name of Jesus – it is a strong tower – prove it. Prove it as you are in the world. That does not mean that every day you have to bombard everyone in the office with your beliefs; it does not mean that you always have to make a nuisance of yourself constantly putting people right; it is your manner of life, it is the way that you seek to live according to the way Jesus lived and according to the way that God would have you live now, as one who is redeemed and justified before Him. It does not mean that you have to spend every spare moment voicing your opinions or thoughts; what it means is that your life has to be consistent with the pattern that has been set by our blessed Saviour Himself, and it means that you speak to people as He would, you hold them in your affections as He would, you hold your brethren, you hold all men in the widest way as God would with a heart that is full of love desiring that they should come into repentance and know what it is to have their sins forgiven. What a tower this is! Often we think of it as somewhere that maybe gives you a defence, a strong tower – it speaks of it as a high tower in the Psalms, “Jehovah will be my high tower”, Ps 94: 22. That may be the idea of defence, but one other thing about a tower is that everyone can see it, and if you are in the tower that bears the Name of Jesus, that is not that you are setting yourself up above other men, it is not that you are giving yourself a place that is above everyone else, it means everyone can see where you are, that you are sheltered in the work of Jesus. We read, “His banner over me is love” (SofS 2: 4). I like to think of this tower not as a bleak and stark object, but as something that has banners waving from it. It speaks of Jesus. People would look up and might say, So and so is in that tower that has the Name of Jesus over it, that is where he has found his refuge. It is not an escape, no, it is something that speaks loudly of the One who has secured you and saved you, the One in whom you have placed your life and your trust, “the righteous runneth into it”. Maybe you run there because you do want protection, but maybe you run there because you love to own the Name of Jesus because it means so much to you. What a Name, the name of Jesus is! I was looking through the hymns and there are many that refer to the name of Jesus. In some countries in the world, the name ‘Jesus’ is a very common name – I think we have an advantage in this country in that the name of Jesus stands out as unique. You rarely, if ever, other than someone who has moved from one of the Spanish-speaking countries, find anyone in this country whose name is Jesus. That helps us, it marks out that precious Name. That same Name that is the rock on which you place your faith and trust and is the same Name that is the tower into which you can run.

So we move on to the city – if you have found what it is to know the rock and the tower, I would suggest to us all that we should be looking for the city. Maybe you can see the city better from the top of the tower, maybe away from the difficulties and the problems that entangle your life, as you get up to the top of the tower, maybe you have a better view of the city. Not only does God have a place for you, (the rock and the tower have been individual, that is something you can do on your own), others have found those places and God wants you to find them. The idea of a city is that it has lots of people in it – maybe from the top of that tower you can see the city. In the end of Revelation in the first city that is mentioned there, the eternal city, it speaks of a city that has many characteristics and they are so different from any city you will know here. It is a transparent city, a new city, a city that has someone who is always with you. It is very reminiscent of the scripture in Hebrews because it says that God will be with them, their God. There are things that are absent from that city and they are things that are definitely not absent from any earthly city; grief, cry, distress, tears, these things shall never be any more. What a city God wants you to come into! He wants you to come in and share with Him in that city. I was thinking as I looked over this scripture of the Queen’s Jubilee year, because as the papers have reported where the Queen has been, there were places where she had not been for twenty five years, even in a small place such as the United Kingdom. There were places that she visited that she had never been to, and it says as to the eternal city that God will be with them, their God. Even on a small island like ours, the sovereign can never know every person, can never have been to every place, but in the Holy City, the city that you can find your place in, the city that God will prepare for you – “for he has prepared for them a city” – He is with you. He is not ashamed of you, no not any more. Why is that? Because you have been bought with a price that was paid by Christ. He looks upon you and He sees Jesus. He looks upon you and He sees how you have been redeemed by the precious work of His Son. He is not ashamed of you; it says, “God is not ashamed of them, to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city”. He has provided a rock, you have got to come by way of the rock: He has provided a tower, what you can find in that tower, I have suggested a few things. He has also prepared a city. Are you living in the city already? Are you by faith and by the Spirit living in that city already? “The lamp thereof is the Lamb” (Rev 21: 23), the One who was slain, where all things are settled, where there is nothing to intrude on your enjoyment. Obviously the actuality of it is yet in a day to come, but now you can enjoy what it is to be in a city with others who have placed their faith and trust in Christ, with others who love to be in the presence of divine Persons and with divine Persons who love to be in your presence too. What a gospel we have to announce! May you know what it is to come to the Rock, to find the place by God, to find your place in the tower if you need it either for refuge or for getting the divine view of many things. May you know what it is to have the hope, and certainty of a city that is prepared for you by God. For His Name’s sake.

SUNBURY

28 July 2002