‘The Call’
AND
HAVE WE ALL REACHED EVEN UNTO GOD’S ‘PLACE’?
Notes of an Address on Gen 22: 1-18.
I have no doubt that God’s place for the saint to reach is, ‘death and resurrection’ in the faith of his soul.
They come before us, I think, in “Reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin” (Rom 6: 11), and, “If ye then be risen with Christ”, Col 3: 1.
Abraham was called twice to reach a place. The first time he stopped short of it. He stopped till his father was dead. The second time he did reach it and in the full energy of faith, and herein he reads to us a lesson. At this, the second call, he does not as at the first consult with country, kindred or father’s house. No, he was farther advanced in the things of God. And having had the second call, “early in the morning”, Abraham rose up, and he “saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him”.
This is a blessed response to God’s call. God has in like manner called to each of His saints. My friends, I would put it afresh to myself to-night, and I would also put it afresh to you as saints, ‘Have you reached God’s place for you’, John 8: 56. Be assured that He has one for you, this one, and this only one!
The history of time and the first man is closed for God in the cross. The unfolding of “purpose” is before God now and in the second Man and for eternity. God has called us to this last order of things. It behoves us then to go to His “place”.
Having reached God’s place, the last tie is snapped. This is what God wants to see in us. Isaac was the link, but Isaac gone, Abraham was wholly cast upon God. Resurrection establishes that God is enough. “From whence also he received him [Isaac] in a figure”, Heb 11: 19. When all is gone here, God is left.
It is only when at “death”, that you get a vision of resurrection. “On the third day Abraham … saw the place afar off”. He had not reached it, but he saw it. The three days must be travelled in the history of our souls. They are preliminary, but necessary to the sight that then opened out, a wonderful sight it was. “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it, and was glad”. That was the dawn of joy for Abraham, for he saw what God would do. No joy apart from the Christ, and the Christ seen risen out of all the sorrow. This is what I understand by “my day”.
“AND THEY CAME TO THE PLACE WHICH GOD HAD TOLD HIM OF”, v 9. It is the place for worship. You only worship when there, see v 5, “I and the lad will go yonder and worship”.
Oh! how much, beloved friends, we lose if we have not yet reached this spot. The very floodgates of heaven are opened now, so to speak—opened upon the lonely man who has learnt that he has now nothing left on earth but GOD! Are they, in the consciousness of your soul, opened upon you? Is there a thing yet, that attaches us to the first man, and to his place? Let us see to it and go.
Now God comes in, in all the immensity of His blessing. “And said, By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son: That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice”, Gen 22: 16-18.
Once more, Have you reached this place? Is death and resurrection your measure of things here, “Because thou hast obeyed my voice”.
I think that all dullness of spirit and defect in walk may be traced to our not reaching, in the experience of our souls, to the place that God has in His purpose for us. It is one thing, beloved friends, to see clearly that God has a purpose, and we may even find that we are able to expatiate largely on it, and on the grace of God manifested in it; but it is quite another thing to have that purpose made good in us by the Holy Spirit. This is God’s desire.
And here I would say, lest any one should think that there is an implied assumption of some having actually reached it, “Not as though I had already attained”, Phil 3: 16. The full thing before us is conformity to Christ in glory, but faith reaches out after what will be presently enjoyed in its fulness, and it does get its foretastes of that even now. This is what I mean. A saint who is in the power and energy of the Spirit, is content with no less than to attain to God’s place, and to enter upon it. Faith always goes forward, and while in the wilderness partakes of the ripe grapes of the land.
There is a good deal of difference in the saints in this respect. To take an extreme case, Paul speaks with a very saddened spirit of Demas. “Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world”, 2 Tim 4: 10. We might put Demas as an extreme case, for the apostle refers to him as one still moving about and recognised among saints. I could not say that Demas had reached, in the enjoyment of his soul, to God’s place—death and resurrection, because he left the company of the man who taught it and lived it. I do not think that God has any other place than this for His saints today, nor do I doubt that it is for our present enjoyment.
Death, on the one side, is the close of all that which attaches to me in association with the “first man”. Resurrection is the entrance of the “second man” upon all that which, as such, appertains to Him. Both are moral. The actuality of this (that is, of resurrection) can only be true of one who is out of death—that is, of CHRIST. But the moral power and good of both can be, and ought to be, known in our souls by saints today, because the saints are of His company. In the company of Christ He makes known to them by the Spirit the good on which He has Himself actually entered, see Col 3: 3; Heb 2: 12.
From A Voice to the Faithful—vol 31, 1897
