DIVINE LOVE AND GRACE

Gordon McKay

Hosea 11: 1-4; 2 Corinthians 5: 14, 15; John 12: 27-33; Matthew 11: 25-30

I wish to speak from these scriptures about the way that divine love and grace draw and hold us, and indeed secure us permanently, for the divine pleasure in the testimony and no doubt eternally. What was in mind was the thought of being drawn “with bands of a man”, how we are drawn to Christ. Where we read in 2 Corinthians as to the love of the Christ, I was thinking of it as constraining us and I wish to speak about how it might develop in our soul exercises in the epistle to the Romans, how divine grace and love constrain and secure indeed so that we become bondmen to God and come into full accord with the will of God, “the good and acceptable and perfect will of God”, Rom 12: 2. Then in John’s gospel there is the drawing of a crucified Christ, “I, if I be lifted up out of the earth, will draw all to me”. These are powerful and wonderful matters. Then in Matthew 11, the Lord’s appeal, “Come to me, all ye who labour and are burdened, and I will give you rest”.

As we proceed we might be drawn to Christ more and more. What should proceed in a meeting like this is not simply enlightenment. We are very thankful for the light that comes and for the contributions that open things up, but what is in mind is that there should be something operating in our affections, a certain movement drawing towards Christ. Outside, other things constrain us. As young people we are brought to meetings, and we might even come to an occasion like this with various motives and thoughts which are not Christ, but it is wonderful to be among the brethren, to come to the place where the Lord might be found.

At the beginning of the Song of Songs, one who is typically a lover of Jesus, one who seeks Christ, asks where He feeds His flock and the answer is, “If thou know not, thou fairest among women, Go thy way forth by the footsteps of the flock, And feed thy kids beside the shepherd’s booths” (1: 8). If you go by the footsteps of the flock you go where the brethren are and follow them, and you will find Christ there. Not only will you find Christ reflected in the saints, but you will find Christ Himself. In all these meetings and in all our exercises the great matter is to find Christ, to have a relationship with the Lord Jesus.

We began in Hosea because it refers to Israel being a child and this scripture is especially applicable to young believers, of whom there are many here. I would like to speak as to how God would work with you, what His thoughts are for you and how He would work with you so that you might think as to how far this has been effective with you. You might say, How much have I been drawn by the “bands of a man, with cords of love”, how has Jesus affected me and drawn me?

The first thing God says is, “When Israel was a child, then I loved him”. Some of the exercises that we might speak of in this line, especially in the epistle to the Romans, are very testing, but it is a wonderful thing to have a sense that you are loved! It impedes your heart if you have not some sense of divine love for you, it makes you resort to legal thinking, thinking of your own faults and unacceptability and so on, but God says, “When Israel was a child, then I loved him”. It is a kind of secret of going on and developing in divine things, to be conscious that God loves you. He has great thoughts for you, “out of Egypt I called my son”. Divine Persons love you, young people. We might say that you are especially the objects of divine love. You are not perfect and Israel is described here in this epistle as by no means perfect. There are these beautiful allusions to how God dealt with Israel as a child, that was Israel when they were just come out of Egypt, newly come forth. Then there are interjected statements as to their failings, but still running right through there is the chain of what God was doing with them.

Israel, having fed on the Passover lamb, had come out into the wilderness, they had come out from Egypt. They were called out and they responded. If you look at the typical scriptures as to how God dealt with them you will find that He dealt tenderly with them. I would love to be able to make the truth attractive, even the most testing truth, because scripture does. It is not easy, the move out of Egypt and into the wilderness. The world becomes a place that does not cater for you any more. We do not actually leave one place and go to another but the very world where we found our life, which catered for us very well in the flesh, we find does not cater for us at all because we have spiritual desires and the world does not do anything for them. God has worked in my soul. I have spiritual desires, moving out in love for Christ, with some desire after the people of God, and the world will not cater for these spiritual desires at all. It will seek to draw you back to the fleshly desires that satisfied you when you were in the world. As you go out of the world, out of Egypt, into the wilderness you find that there is nothing for you there. That means you are thrown back on God and you find that where the world provides nothing for you He can provide everything in tender care, He can meet every need. If you read the history of how Israel came out of Egypt, the difficulties they went through, you find the care that divine Persons expended upon them as alluded to here, “I it was that taught Ephraim to walk, -- He took them upon his arms”. It describes a certain tenderness. It is the bands of a man, the Lord Jesus whom we are seeking to set forth, and His love for you. This is reflected in the saints too, for persons who know Him take on something of His feelings and something of His activities. He uses them so that I might get some sense of how much divine love is towards me. I am sure you must understand, young people, that the brethren love you, and that is a reflection of Christ’s love for you. Not only your parents, but the brethren love you and desire to do the best for you. So, when Israel came out of Egypt, God took them upon His arms and He drew them “with bands of a man, with cords of love”. From this typical teaching we can understand that God was working on this principle; really the Man that was in mind for us is Christ. In fact what happened when they came out of Egypt was that Moses and Aaron were looking after them and leading them, caring for them and praying for them, and divine care was coming in in that. So, God says, “I drew them with bands of a man, with cords of love”.

They came out and then complained and God was not hard on them. They spoke about going back to Egypt and they asked for food, they hungered, they complained, they murmured, and God was not hard on them. He gave them food. They came out and they thirsted and the waters of Marah were bitter and He made them sweet for them. “Jehovah shewed him wood, and he cast it into the waters, and the waters became sweet” (Exod 15: 25). That is one of the allusions to Christ you can see in these early days of Israel, to the blessed Man that went into death. As you love Him and understand His love for you in going into death, then you can understand how it is that you can accept death and accept the wilderness. Then God fed them, He gave them quails and the manna and at one point, which is very often taken up in connection with this thoughts of the “bands of a man”, Moses told Aaron to speak to the people, to tell them to come into the presence of Jehovah. These were people that were murmuring, and it says, “And it came to pass, when Aaron spoke to the whole assembly of the children of Israel, that they turned toward the wilderness”, Exod 16: 10. The people turned at the voice of Aaron. That is a reference to the voice of Christ, the priestly, gracious voice of Christ –‘Do not go back to Egypt, I know these things were once appealing to you, and you might think things are hard in our Christian path, but do not go back’. The people listened to the voice. The Lord Jesus’ voice would come into a meeting like this. If it has come into your heart to go back to Egypt, He would say, do not go back, turn towards the wilderness. When they turned towards the wilderness they saw “the glory of Jehovah”. God made Himself manifest. Then food came that very evening, and in the morning, and there was full supply. God gently caused them to eat, having released them from the bondage of Egypt and brought them out. That was what was in my mind, that in our exercises we might prove something of the Lord Jesus. We have been speaking about His glories as brought before us in these readings, the glories of Christ. Another way that we can learn the Lord Jesus is experimentally, what He can be to us, what a blessed Man He can be for my heart, what He can do for me, how He can feed me, how He cares for me, how He can speak with a voice that reaches into my affections so that I do not go back to Egypt but follow on in the pathway, that is the pathway of the will of God.

I read in 2 Corinthians 5 because of the word constrain, “the love of the Christ constrains us, having judged this”. That is that love known in Christ, the One that died for us, constrains us and in addition to that, under the constraint of divine love we are judging something, we are thinking. God expects us to calculate. There are spontaneous movements of affections that only the Lord Jesus can draw out from our hearts but we are also expected to become intelligent persons and to think as to what is right in the light of divine blessings. We find that in Romans, there are certain things that we can reckon, certain things that we are to be intelligent as to. Thus Paul says “having judged this … he died for all, that they who live should no longer live to themselves”. You can see that: the Lord Jesus died for me and He secured me from eternal loss, and then what? Should I live to myself? Can I just go on and ignore that? No. It is necessary and right that I should no longer live to myself but to the blessed Man who died for me and has been raised. My life should be in the direction of Christ, I should live to Him who died for me, “and has been raised”.

That brought to my mind the teaching of the epistle to Romans, a very difficult book in some ways when you are young and you read it. What I would like to say is, that while Romans is doctrine and teaching which we need, placing matters in our histories in a certain order so that we are not totally at a loss, not going through uncharted seas, right through beautiful attractive features that come in. When the people left Egypt and went into the wilderness, the next thing was that they came to Sinai and God made a covenant with them and asked them to commit themselves to Him. He committed Himself to them, He said, you will be my people (see Exod 19: 5). That is a very important point. We are speaking about being bound by divine love, and a question might be then as to whether divine love as seen in Christ is so great and compelling to me, so constraining to me that I am going to commit myself. I cannot just treat divine things lightly; I have to commit myself to the Lord Jesus, to God Himself. These exercises come into Romans. I do not want to speak especially about how discouragement comes in in regard to them. Most here would know how severe some of these exercises can be, but I want to speak about how we might be helped, not to be totally burdened and overcome by them.

One of the attractive features that come in is the thought of the love of God being shed abroad in our hearts (see Rom 5: 5). It is a very important thing to receive the Spirit and have this sense that you are loved. It says, “if indeed ye have tasted that the Lord is good” (1 Peter 2: 3). That means that the Lord is gracious. It says also in Romans, “If God be for us” (8: 31). When we are young we tend to be taken up with our own thoughts and failings and shortcomings, but the great overwhelming sense that God would put into our souls is that in spite of all that we are and all that we were, God loves us and He gives us the Holy Spirit to impart this: “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts”, Rom. 5: 5. We get some sense of the God we have to do with. The blessed God whom we can commit ourselves to is the One who commends His love to us. We often use it in the preaching, but it is addressed to believers, and we can always resort to that, “God commends his love to us, in that, we being still sinners, Christ has died for us” (Rom 5: 8).

Then exercises arise such as the one in chapter 6. If we are to come out of Egypt we have to be in the truth of baptism and if we have been baptised to Christ Jesus we have been baptised unto His death. That is very testing, that we become identified with Christ, we become one with Him morally in the likeness of His death, which is the truth of baptism. That is testing, but what I wanted to point out is that the thought in mind is, “in order that, even as Christ has been raised up from among the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also should walk in newness of life” (v 4). It is newness of life in our walk down here. There is a wonderful encouragement placed there, a kind of heavenly glow placed over that scripture because it says, “Christ has been raised up from among the dead by the glory of the Father”. That glory, the love that took Christ out of the grave, how He was raised up from among the dead by the glory of the Father in blessed life – there should be some reflection of that in our walk in newness of life. You find that Romans abounds in encouragement. If we are going to reckon ourselves dead to sin it is because we can see that, “in that he lives, he lives to God” (v 10). So we become associated with Christ in these things.

Then there is the thought of bondmanship, how we were once bondmen to sin, once disobedient, and the gospel brings us into obedience. There is grace in it all, for we get our freedom from sin, and become bondmen to righteousness. It is a process, we yield our members, “For even as ye have yielded your members in bondage to uncleanness and to lawlessness unto lawlessness, so now yield your members in bondage to righteousness unto holiness” (Rom. 5: 19). Paul uses these words, bondage, then “bondmen to God” (v 22). You can see how divine grace is intended to work with us to secure us. It is divine love that is behind it all. These things are to encourage us. I know to the flesh it is irksome, but the thought is that I become happy in coming into this position of bondmanship. I become happy because I have been relieved from the bondage of sin and unrighteousness.

When we come to Romans 7, what I want to say is that the mistake that we may make is that we try to go through these exercises alone. What I mean by ‘alone’ is that we try to go through them without Christ and without the Spirit. That is not the thought. Romans 7 begins with One who is a husband who has been raised up from among the dead. We are “to be to another, who has been raised up from among the dead” (v 4). The thought is that we go through these exercises supported by the love of Christ in His presence. The danger is that we might seek to try to do it alone. If you try to settle these severe exercises alone you might find that Satan wants to be there and your thoughts are darkened and you are disheartened. The great thing is that matters are settled in your soul in the presence of Christ and you can turn to Him. As you are doing these things, as you are becoming identified with Christ in the likeness of His death in the truth of baptism, as you understand what newness of life is you are being associated with Him. Then as you go through the exercises of Romans 7 the Lord Jesus becomes endeared to you, you prove what He can be. The bands of a man are no longer just a phrase in the Old Testament, but you find that you are being constrained by that blessed Man yourself. You love Him more and more, not only because He died for you and secured you for your eternal welfare but because presently He is a living Saviour and loves you and cares for you as a husband would care for a wife.

These things then cease to become onerous to us. It is not that there is a spirit of bondage, Romans 8 speaks of not receiving a spirit of bondage, “but ye have received a spirit of adoption” (v 15). It is not that things are irksome to us, and so when we become fully committed, even as to our bodies in Romans 12 it is a question of, “the good and acceptable and perfect will of God” (v 2). We often speak of that as a kind of increase, but from the beginning it is “good”, a way of happiness, a way of peace and rest for your soul to be secured like this, to be delivered from Egypt and from what Satan would do and from the flesh. It is clear in Romans that that is the thought, that we are delivered from the world around us, delivered from the power of sin and from the power of the flesh so that we might prove the power of the Holy Spirit. These things are intended to be encouraging to us.

The scripture in John’s gospel is a very testing one. We have been speaking about being attracted to the Lord Jesus in all His grace, but I would like to speak about being attracted to Christ crucified. We have been speaking in the readings about the Lord Jesus and the great centre He is of God’s purposes, but in the accomplishment of these wondrous, great purposes of God, these verses were necessary: “Now is the judgment of this world; now shall the prince of this world be cast out: and I, if I be lifted up out of the earth, will draw all to me”. We have been speaking about all things and how the Lord Jesus becomes the centre, but here He becomes the centre as raised up out of the earth, that is crucified. In all our contemplation of the Lord Jesus I think it is very important that we think much about His death, we think about His sufferings, we think about His death. These things endear Him to us. I think the bands of a man and cords of love develop in our souls too as we contemplate His sufferings. Here He is lifted up out of the earth. What an awful thing the crucifixion was, lifted up out of the earth, the most awful death, public and utterly humiliating. That is the way the Lord Jesus died, lifted up out of the earth. Yet as lifted up He draws all to Him. Have you been drawn to a suffering Christ, have your affections gone out to that Man, that blessed One who died? He died so that there on the cross there might be the most wonderful testimony to the love of God so that it becomes compelling. To the flesh I suppose such a scene would be repulsive. It would not attract your flesh at all but as God works in our souls, that blessed Man crucified becomes attractive because we see the wondrous grace of divine love expressed in Him, and He is lifted up out of the earth to draw us. It is not to be drawn together to something on the earth, but drawn out of this earth. The Lord Jesus said, “I, if I be lifted up out of the earth, will draw all to me”. What volumes there are in these scriptures, what a lesson book the death of Christ is, what depth is involved in it! There is the full terrible exposure of the sinfulness of man, of the man who dishonoured God. The judgment was falling on the One who honoured Him, but the man who is being removed in the death of Christ is the man who dishonoured God. It was a public exposure, He was lifted up out of the earth, all could see Him, God showing to the universe what He thinks about sin and also demonstrating His wondrous love. Thus that blessed One would draw to Him those that God’s love was set on. Have you been drawn to the blessed suffering One? The Lord Jesus says that is what will happen, “I, if I be lifted up out of the earth, will draw all to me”. Have you been drawn to Him? It means that the One you are drawn to is One that is hated in this world, One that was humiliated here, One that was scorned and jeered at and still is, and if you are going to cast in your lot with Him you will be scorned and jeered at too. Are you prepared for that? Are you prepared to take on that reproach? If you love Christ His love will be such for you that it will draw you into a position where you will gladly do that, you will take your place.

Later in the gospel you find certain persons stood by the cross of Jesus. Are you prepared to stand by the cross of Jesus, to take your stand there, associate yourself in that sense? What proceeded there goes beyond anything that we can have part in, but yet it is possible that we might stand there by the cross of Jesus. Certain women did, and their names are given, John does not say that he was standing by the cross of Jesus, he tells about the others that were, but he recounts that Jesus saw the other disciple standing there. Jesus saw John standing there and committed something to him (see John 19: 26). What an appeal that is! How wonderful divine love is so that against everything that I would desire in the flesh, and everything that would please me in the flesh it would draw me into a suffering position. It is because of the love of Christ, because of what I find in Him. That is what the Christian path involves. You can see the constraint of it, you can see the way that we are brought thus under the influence of Christ, so that we are prepared to take our place with Him in the testimony.

In Matthew 11 there is the thought of the yoke. Here we have the Lord Jesus calling to us to come alongside Him, “Come to me”. He is the Man who is rejected and yet in the time of His rejection He is praising the Father, rising above all the outward rejection in praise to the Father, rejoicing in what the Father was doing and bringing out wonderful truths that we have already been speaking about, “No one knows the Son but the Father, nor does any one know the Father, but the Son, and he to whom the Son may be pleased to reveal him”. Here is the appeal and it may be to us, (we could use it in the glad tidings, but it applies to saints too), “Come to me, all ye who labour and are burdened”. Brethren know what it is, for if we are no longer labouring and burdened by our sins yet in the testimony of the Lord we know what labour can be and what burden can be. The Lord allows these things, the hostility and all that might come upon the believer, but the Lord Jesus says, “Come to me … I will give you rest”. He can do it. He is calling us alongside of Him. Is that not a wonderful appeal to come to Him and take our place alongside Him? He is in rejection and He is not overcome by it, He is rejoicing in what the Father is doing. He says, “Come to me … and I will give you rest” and then He says, “ye shall find rest”. There are two allusions to rest. It is a thing greatly to be coveted, to be at rest in your soul, even in the face of tribulation and difficulty. We are often troubled, and sometimes there are things which might rightly trouble us, but the Lord Jesus’ thought is to bring us into rest. So He says, “Come to me … and I will give you rest”. There is a rest He gives and there is a rest we find. If you read this section, this would appeal to our minds, that when He first says, “I will give you rest” He is alluding to what He has just said previously, “no one knows the Son but the Father, nor does any one know the Father, but the Son, and he to whom the Son may be pleased to reveal him”. Those that are laboured and burdened are coming to the One who can reveal the Father. What great rest of soul to come to the One who is superior to all the tribulations and all that is around, and is the only One who can reveal the Father, who can bring the Father’s love into your heart. How blessed that is.

Then, “Take my yoke upon you”. Think of the appeal of this, the Lord Jesus saying as it were, Come alongside me, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me” – not learn from me in the sense of being taught by me, that is not the thought, the thought is to learn from Him by seeing Him Himself and how He is conducting Himself in these circumstances so that we might take example from Him. Thus we learn from Him, the meek and lowly Jesus and it says, “ye shall find rest to your souls”. The rest we find to our souls is in taking that yoke. He says, and this is one thing which I have been seeking to try to indicate, that these things are intended to be acceptable to us, they are not intended to be so burdensome that we have to recoil from them. He says, “my yoke is easy, and my burden is light”. His yoke was the will of God, He was bound there in regard to the will of God and we can be so too. That is the way of rest. The way of trouble is the way of rebellion against the will of God, the way of rest is to be like the Lord Jesus and to take His yoke upon us, “my yoke is easy, and my burden is light”.

John says in his epistle in regard to the commandments of God that his commandments are not grievous (see 1 John 5: 3). It is not intended that we should be grudging Christians, going on rebelling consciously in our minds, doing things because we know they are right but inwardly rebelling against them. What the Lord Jesus sets out before us here is a happy acquiescence in the will of God. It is not burdensome, “my yoke is easy, and my burden is light”. The secret is that God has worked in our souls so that the flesh is not given full rein, it does not govern us, and we can find the will of God good, acceptable and perfect. I think it is a beautiful scripture, a beautiful appeal to come alongside Him and learn from Him by observing Him and to be given rest by Him, to be in the place where divine disclosures are, the most precious things, and to find rest to our souls in being like Him. How much labour and burden there is, but then the thought is that we should find rest.

I know that what I have said has not emphasised the serious and severe side of these exercises and how testing they are as to the world and as to the flesh, but I was seeking to emphasise what divine grace and love would do to make it easier for us to come into things. May we all come into these things, and as these meetings proceed perhaps we could individually be thinking to ourselves, Is Christ becoming more to me? Is He drawing nearer to me? Am I drawing nearer to Him? Am I set to be conformed to Him?

May the Lord bless the word.

 

SUNBURY

25 March 2005