“WHAT IS UNDER THY HAND?”
J. G. Chalmers
David coming to Nob to the priest would represent the Lord coming to a locality and relating Himself to what is priestly in that place. David was in rejection and it was a critical time. The time of Christ’s rejection, in which we are, has been marked by crisis after crisis and it will be so right to the end for Satan is a relentless foe. But a distinctive feature of the period of Christ’s rejection is the economy of local assemblies, the divine mind being that what is due to God will be maintained in priestly power and affection in every local assembly whether times are normal or abnormal.
David raises this question with the priest,
“What is under thy hand?” All things are said to be in the hands of the Son in John 3: 35—
that brings out His glory in the economy as the Administrator. All the treasure of his master was said to be under the hand of Abraham’s, servant, and that brings out in type the glory of the Holy Spirit in the economy as the One who is here to make effective in the souls of the saints in a subjective way what the Lord is giving them from on high. That is what the Lord is looking for when He comes to our local assemblies, what is under our hand. The younger brethren may be wondering how the Lord comes and in what way He raises a question like this. Well, for instance, we come together for a reading and, the going may be heavy, like the disciples rowing and making little progress, but some brother, often a young one, asks a simple question and we get the sense that the Lord comes in on that and brings out the wealth of what has been wrought in the souls of the saints by the Spirit.
It is a real challenge as to what is under our hand. The priest says here, “There is no common bread under my hand, but there is holy bread”. No common bread, but holy bread! Can we say, dear brethren, that there is no common bread under our hand? Alas, they could not say that at Corinth. Paul has to say to them in regard of their emulation and strife, “are ye not carnal, and walk according to man?”, and as to their divided state, “are ye not men?”, 1
Corinthians 3: 3, 4. Their behaviour, their language, their treatment of each other was according to mere natural man. That was Corinth. What about our local assemblies? What is common does not belong to the assembly of God; “nothing common ... shall at all enter into it”, Revelation 21: 27. What is common can only come in as any of us give place to the man that God has totally set aside in the death of Christ, and the answer to that is constant self-judgment and humbling ourselves.
We can have holy bread. The Holy Spirit is here to glorify Christ and to form Him in the saints. God has that Man in His presence and He is infinitely complacent in Him and finds boundless pleasure in Him. When David went in and sat in God’s presence something must have affected him profoundly for he exclaimed, “Is this the manner of man, Lord Jehovah?”, 2 Samuel 7: 19. As we go into God’s presence, Christ is there, and the Father has given us of His Spirit so that He can share with us in His pleasure in Jesus. As we ask the Spirit it gives Him joy to impart impressions to us of what there is in Jesus that gives the Father such delight. Ah, dear brethren, that is the kind of Man that the Spirit is forming in the saints, and the spirit of that Man should permeate every local assembly. Christ in the saints—that is holy food, and that food builds up a priestly constitution in the saints in view of the service of God and in view of being able to stand for God in the conflict in critical days.
David asks about food first and then about a sword, “Is there not here under thy hand spear or sword?” It is important in critical times that the saints are fed on holy bread so that there is manhood formed that can face up to, and sustain, what is involved in the conflict for the truth.
What would our answer be to such a question? The priest says that the sword of Goliath was there, wrapped up in a cloth behind the ephod. What good was it doing there, not in use? It is like the truth being held objectively only. We have all the truth in the Bible and in the accredited ministries of the recovery—thank God for that. But the question is as to what is under our hand. What moral effect has the truth had upon me personally? That is the vital question. That is what matters.
The sword of Goliath is a type of death which in the hand of Satan held persons in bondage.
The Lord Jesus has wrested death from the hand of Satan by conflict (Hebrews 2: 14, 15). He is now risen and ascended and death is in His hands and He gives it to the believer as a servant. Death is ours. It has aptly been described as the greatest weapon in the arsenal of God when wielded in the power of life. Have we learned to use this mighty weapon? In the struggle of Romans 7 we learn that we are powerless in the presence of the power of sin working in our flesh; as one young man said of that struggle, he found that old Adam was too strong for young John. How true that is! Well, that struggle leads you to find the Deliverer, Jesus Christ our Lord, and to learn how to use death in regard to what you find in yourself; you learn to put to death the deeds of the body and live. And so it is that in every exercise in your soul history that causes you trouble and distress you can find an answer as you use this mighty weapon, the word of God in the power of the Spirit. Then, by extension, you can meet every issue as to the truth with this same weapon, the word of God which is the sword of the Spirit.
Well, dear brethren, I feel challenged by these questions, but the Lord does not raise them to expose us but rather to bring out what the Spirit has wrought amongst us. I trust that as we face up to them that we may be able to say that there is under our hand both holy bread and the sword of Goliath of which the language of faith would say with David, “There is none like that”.
Word in meeting for ministry, Lossiemouth
24 July 1984