THREE NECESSITIES
[p. 40] THREE NECESSITIES
Genesis 21: 14 - 19; Genesis 22: 1 - 14; Genesis 24:1-4; Genesis 24:66,67
We find in these three chapters pictures of three great necessities, and the way in which they are met. The water of life is necessary for man, the burnt-offering is necessary for the glory of God, and the bride is necessary for the satisfaction of the heart of Christ.
Ishmael was connected by the closest natural tie with one who is called the friend of God. He was born and brought up in the place of greatest privilege on earth. He thus represents a natural man favoured with divine privileges. There are those here tonight who have been born into christian households, brought up under christian instruction and surrounded by christian influences. You have had privileges greater than Ishmael’s, but they have not perhaps affected your heart or subdued your will.
Ishmael had to do with a person who was a remarkable type of Christ. Indeed it was not until Isaac came upon the scene that Ishmael appeared in his true colours. When the child of promise — a type of Christ — was honoured in Abraham’s house, Ishmael’s heart had no share in the joy. Up to that moment he might have passed as a decent professor, but the presence of Isaac — and the joy of the house in honour of Isaac — exposed him in his true character. He was unmasked; his heart was laid bare; he was discovered to be a mocker.
Can this be a picture of some person here tonight? Yes! you may be a decent professor of religion, you may say your daily prayers and read your daily chapter, and be found every Sunday at church, chapel or meeting room, and yet have no delight in Christ! You may be able to sustain a conversation on religious topics in general, but if any one wants to speak of Christ you feel awkward and at a loss! You think out-and-out Christians are odd, peculiar and somewhat [p. 41] fanatical. You wish people would not make so much fuss about spiritual matters. Ah, if one ray of the glory of Christ had ever shone into your heart how differently you would think of things! The awful fact is you are an entire stranger to God’s grace and to the Lord Jesus Christ.
But God knows how to awaken a sense of need even in the conscience and heart of a mocker. Ishmael and his mother were driven out of Abraham’s house to learn in the desert the poverty of all their resources. And it seems to me we have a picture of human life in verses 14 - 16. Hagar and Ishmael started on their journey with bread and a bottle of water. All start in life with certain abilities and resources for which they are indebted to God — health, strength, natural powers and capacities of different kinds. These things supply a limited fund of resources to man. They yield for a time a certain kind of satisfaction, or rather gratification. At first no lack is felt. Draughts of pleasure abound in childhood and youth, but every one is a drain on a reservoir of limited dimensions. The store in the bottle gets less and less. Very often as a man’s wealth increases, and he has enlarged means to gratify himself, his pleasure and satisfaction diminish. As life advances, satisfaction recedes from the heart. The bottle gets emptier with every draught, until the last drop is drained, and the sinner left face to face with death.
What an end to “the pleasures of life”! What a mockery earth’s greatness and pleasures seem when we see them leading to death! Unconverted friend, death, judgment, and eternity are before you, and if this lays hold of you it will make you think differently of everything. Ishmael was brought face to face with death, and he had to find that he could not help himself. He lay helpless under a shrub and his mother left him to die. Ah, the bottle was empty indeed! You will come to this some day. You will have no power to retain the spirit, and those who love you best on earth will not be able to help you.
Another thing we may notice. Hagar was a type of the law (Galatians 4), and she could not avert the death of the child. The [p. 42] law cannot save or help a sinner. The priest and Levite in Luke 10 — typical of the ceremonial and moral law — could not help the man who was naked, wounded and half-dead. Such a one needs not the claim of law but the gift of grace. He needs the salvation of God. Ishmael in his extremity was shut up to God, and from verse 17 it appears that he cried to God. “And God heard the voice of the lad ... and God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water; and she went, and filled the flask with water, and gave the lad drink”. A source of life and blessing provided by God was close at hand, but Hagar’s eyes had to be opened to see it. There is “a well of water” today available for all. The Son of God has come into this world and has died that He might become in resurrection the divine Source of life and blessing for man. Though we have forfeited everything by our sin and have justly fallen under death and judgment, divine love has undertaken for us. The Lord Jesus has come into our place as made sin upon the cross, and He has so glorified God as to sin that on the divine side there is no barrier to the blessing of every sinner under heaven.
And, further, not only is the way of blessing open for man by the death of Christ, and through faith in His Name, but that way of blessing has been opened in such a manner as to make God known to His poor creatures who have been estranged from Him by sin. His holy hatred of sin has been made known, His righteousness manifested in dealing with it, His love, grace and boundless mercy toward man have been expressed in the gift of His only-begotten Son, and His power set forth in raising up the Lord Jesus from the dead when all had been accomplished. There is not a single attribute of God that has not been vindicated at the cross, and His blessed nature of holy love has fully expressed itself.
Now the glory of the gospel is that all this is set forth therein so that God may be known by men as a Saviour God. We are under death, but God comes to us there by sending His Son to die, so that we might enter into life by being [p. 43] brought to know Him. The water of life which God is giving freely to every one that thirsts is the knowledge of Himself. There was but one way in which God could make Himself known to men, and that was by the gift and death of His Son. The Son of God is the “well of water”, and whosoever will may believe on Him and “take the water of life freely”. Alas! to multitudes in christian England these are mere commonplaces of Bible teaching! They see nothing wonderful, blessed and worthy of God in it. It produces no exercise — in some cases hardly occupies a passing thought. Alas for such! They are, indeed, utterly dead towards God.
In Genesis 22 God requires Abraham to offer up Isaac “for a burnt-offering”. The burnt-offering was an offering which went up altogether as a sweet-smelling savour to God, and it was for the acceptance of the offerer. It sets forth the ground on which God sets His called and chosen saints before Him for His own glory, and for the gratification of His own heart. But before we consider the burnt-offering it may be as well to look briefly at the sin-offering, for if we do not know the efficacy of the latter we shall hardly be prepared to enter into the blessedness of the former. Read Leviticus 4: 1 - 12.
The first thing I call your attention to is that the offerer identified himself with the victim by laying his hand upon its head. It was as much as to say, ‘This bullock dies for me’. Have you ever thus identified yourself by faith with the death of Christ? Of course it is impossible to do so until you see how He has in grace identified Himself with you by coming under that to which you were liable by reason of sin. I should like you to think of three things: your position, your practice and your prospect.
The fall brought about an immense change in man’s position. Before any judgment was executed, or one word had been said by God about what had happened, Adam and Eve hid themselves behind the trees of the garden. God had to ask the question, “Where art thou?” Sin had put distance [p. 44] between God and man, and this distance remains. Every unconverted man is “far off” from God; he dwells in a “far country” of alienation from God.
Then our practice was consistent with our position. As sinners alienated from God we walked in trespasses and sins, “according to the age of this world, according to the ruler of the authority of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience: among whom we also all once had our conversation in the lusts of our flesh, doing what the flesh and the thoughts willed to do, and were children, by nature, of wrath, even as the rest” (Ephesians 2: 1 - 3).
Occupying such a position and characterised by such a practice, what could be our prospect? It is declared in the words, “Dust thou art; and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3: 19). “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6: 23). All our greatness and pleasure ends in death, after which there is the judgment of God upon us for the deeds done in the body, when we shall be judged according to our works (Revelation 20: 13).
Now let us see how perfectly the Lord Jesus has identified Himself with us in wondrous grace and love. I trust it is clear to every one of us that the Lord Jesus “knew no sin”. From the manger to the cross He was ever an object of deepest delight to the heart of God. His position was a perfect contrast to that of the sons of Adam. But the bullock of the sin-offering had to go forth without the camp (Leviticus 4: 12). It had to go into a position which denoted the distance at which man was from God by sin. “Wherefore also Jesus, that he might sanctify the people by his own blood, suffered without the gate” (Hebrews 13: 12). The literal position “without the gate” was a type of the far-off place in which He became the Forsaken One for us, and had to cry as the Sin-bearer, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Then not only had sin put distance between us and God, but our sins justly rendered us liable to His holy judgment. The fire by which the bullock of the sin-offering was consumed prefigured this. The Lord Jesus has endured that holy [p. 45] judgment for us, bearing our sins in His own body on the tree, and suffering for them, the Just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God. If our history as children of Adam must close in death, how blessed to know that the Son of God has come into death for us, that in the place of our condemnation we might find not only divine love and grace in our favour, but divine righteousness also.
The blood is the witness of all this (Leviticus 4: 6, 7). It bears witness on God’s side of the vindication of all His attributes, and to us of complete purgation of sins so that we are in conscience “perfected for ever”. “We have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of offences”. We are perfectly cleared of everything that was against us before God; every accusation is silenced, every charge met, every sin gone. Such is the divine clearance of the believer.
But in connection with the burnt-offering we come to superlative grace (read Leviticus 1: 1 - 9). It was “an offering by fire to Jehovah of a sweet odour”. It sets forth Christ as the One who has “delivered himself up for us, an offering and sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour” (Ephesians 5: 2). Not only has Christ taken up our liabilities as sinners, but He has taken up the whole question of sin for the glory of God. Sin has been visited with holy judgment, but this has come to pass in the sacrifice of One who brought all the excellence and moral glory of His own Person into the place of that judgment. The greatness of His Person enabled Him to bear and exhaust that infinite judgment, but who can measure the perfect love, the absolute devotedness to God, the holy and unswerving obedience, the deep perfection of every motive of His heart under God’s eye in that matchless offering of Himself? All this has gone up as a sweet-smelling savour to God. The glory of God is secured, but at the same time His heart has been gratified in an infinite way.
Notice, too, that the burnt-offering was an offering for acceptance. Leviticus 1: 3 should read, “he shall present it for his acceptance”, and verse 4 says, “it shall be accepted for him”. The difference between the sin-offering and the burnt- [p. 46] offering is plainly indicated by the terms used in connection with each. In connection with the sin-offering we read, “and it shall be forgiven him” (Leviticus 4:26; Leviticus 4:31; Leviticus 4:35), but in connection with the burnt-offering, “it shall be accepted for him”. One is an offering for clearance and the other for acceptance.
If all the preciousness and sweet savour of Christ as brought out in the place of atonement are the ground of our acceptance, how infinite is that acceptance! God makes His called and chosen saints to be “accepted in the Beloved” (Ephesians 1: 6), to “the praise of the glory of his grace”. It is for the satisfaction of His own heart that God the Father is pleased to set His saints thus before Him in sonship. It is “according to the good pleasure of his will” that He will fill His house with a glorious company of “many sons”. Thus on the ground of the burnt-offering God will gratify His own nature in having us in righteousness, joy and holy love before His face, “conformed to the image of his Son, so that he should be the firstborn among many brethren” (Romans 8: 29).
Turning now to Genesis 24 we come to a type of what the assembly is for Christ. Man gets the water of life, the Father gets many sons and Christ gets the church. The result of the servant’s mission was that Isaac “took Rebecca, and she became his wife; and he loved her. And Isaac was comforted after the death of his mother” (verse 67). Israel, having rejected Christ, does not minister to His satisfaction. So far as the comfort and joy of Christ are concerned Israel is dead. And now in the time of His rejection by Israel He receives the church and she becomes the satisfaction of His heart according to the Father’s purpose.
I cannot now enter into this, but I should like the youngest believer here to be impressed by the thought of what the assembly is to Christ. We have been separated from the world by God’s grace and by His work in our souls, that we might come into a circle where the love of Christ is known. God’s purpose in saving us was that we might be in the company of whom it is said, “Christ also loved the assembly, and has delivered himself up for it, in order that he might sanctify [p. 47] it, purifying it by the washing of water by the word, that he might present the assembly to himself glorious, having no spot, or wrinkle, or any of such things; but that it might be holy and blameless” (Ephesians 5: 25 - 27).
Christ has received the assembly for His own satisfaction and joy. He loves the assembly and has given Himself for it that He might have it altogether for Himself. And now His love is active towards it that He may have it in entire moral suitability to Himself. Everything that is of the world and of the flesh — everything that is not morally “glorious” — must be removed so that He may rest in His love. If the thought takes hold of our hearts that we are to be for the satisfaction of Christ it will put us on an entirely new line and give us a new estimate of everything. We shall be prepared to yield ourselves, if I may so say, to the activities of His sanctifying love so that everything about us which has not been wrought in us by God may be set aside. We shall not be reluctant to let the things of earth go if we understand that their going sets us more free to know the love of Christ. I venture to think that Rebecca thought more of the person she was going to than of the things she had to leave behind in order to reach him. As the love of Christ holds us, we are ready to leave without regret the things which once were necessary to us. And as we leave things here, we prove that there is infinite compensation in the love of Christ.
May God give every one of us to know that we are saved so that we may be of the assembly! That assembly for which Christ gave Himself, and which He sanctifies, that He may present it to Himself for the satisfaction of His own love!