SWIMMING

^[p. 508] SWIMMING

2 Kings 6: 5 - 7; Acts 27: 40 - 44; Ezekiel 47: 5

I use these three scriptures in the gospel testimony, and especially because they all use the word ‘swim’, which points to experience in the water, and energetic experience. The idea of energy is essential to salvation, and so it enters into the gospel both from God’s side and from the side of the sinner. A lethargic condition is painful indeed to heaven, as it is to us who are interested in souls; and the energy with which God approached the matter of salvation and the cost are intended to affect us, so that there might be a corresponding movement with us.

In the first passage, it was not simply an iron tool, a manufactured article, but it was the iron that fell into the water. It was a borrowed article. Men generally are borrowed. Satan uses men. They are not his. He cannot give life; he cannot raise from the dead, but he uses men, women, and children who from the creative side belong to God. And so we are enjoined to remember our Creator in the days of our youth. Satan is not that: God is, and any one taking us on, taking us out of His hand, is interfering with His rights. This type of the iron follows upon Naaman, a well-known character in Scripture. He had been employed. He was a warrior, a soldier of high rank (of which there are many now) and a successful soldier. He was not lost in battle; indeed. God had used him in battle as illustrative of what has come before us, of God’s right and activities among men as such — a distinguished Syrian, a successful warrior. God using him for Syria’s deliverance. We may say in our minds, Is God delivering Syria or other countries today? Well, we have to discern and see what God is doing in these matters, for He sometimes goes out of His way to do things that we often think He cannot do. He is always ^[p. 509] sovereign, and many are looking to Him for deliverance of present Syrians in difficulties. And He uses whom and what He will, and always with success, too, but He may be using leprous people. The generals and presidents are leprous men; they cannot be otherwise, yet they can be used. Naaman had been used of God but used as leprous. We may marvel at that if we stop to think of it — but he was a leper — as we have often heard — and he had to do with Jordan. He had to be washed in it. He had not fallen into the Jordan, but he had to do with it. He shrank from it, ridiculed it, but be was advised strongly and affectionately to dip into it, not fall into it. Woe to the man that falls into it! The iron here had fallen. It was borrowed, and it had gone out of sight. Naaman had not gone out of sight, certainly not out of his own sight. He was a great man with his master, but he was a great man in his own estimation, leper though he was. In truth, the cause of leprosy is self-will and pride. He is one of the distinguished lepers. He was not lost in battle, as I said, nor in any way. He was still listening to his men. We have the account of his master, the account of his servants, and the account of the handmaid of his wife. It was well for him that there was such a person as this captive maid! She became an evangelist, and through her advice the light was afforded, and he finally reached the Jordan. He did not fall in; he plunged in. He had some energy. He was not like the axe-head loose from its handle. It was helpless, as it were, to save itself, and fell in.

And this brings up the question of energy in swimming. Naaman plunged in. He had hesitated to accept the evangelical word, the word of God. How many are like that, declining to hear the word of God, ready to hear other things, but not the word of God? It is a great advantage to be here ready to ^[p. 510] hear, for affectionate, gracious, intelligent sympathy surrounds you and would persuade you to change your mind since you came in. The current is in the right direction; get into it, submitting your mind to the whole economy of the Spirit of God in this evangelical meeting. And so it was that Naaman came under influence, prophetic influence. I hope this meeting is not wanting in some prophetic influence; that is, what comes from God in the way of persuasion. Naaman got under that influence, first in Elisha, and then in his own servants. They called him “father” reverentially, and he plunges into the Jordan. He had thought that the rivers of Damascus were equally virtuous, if not more so, but there is no river like Jordan. There are many large rivers, but none with the same virtue, none with the same distinction as the Jordan. It has a great distinction in this connection, and Naaman had to do with it and got what he needed. He had energy, but the iron did not; for it is a person symbolised in the iron who did not have energy and went to the bottom. If believers go into the water, they do not go to the bottom. The Egyptians went to the bottom; they sank as a stone, and that is like this iron, too. It had been borrowed, and it had a history. There were obligations connected with it, and so it is that most people get blessing because obligation has been connected with them — parental obligation, brotherly obligation, neighbourly obligation. The iron had no energy in itself; it sank to the bottom as the Egyptians did, like a stone. How awful it is when death overtakes you and you have no power to meet it at all, no swimming power! Death for the unbeliever is simply agonising, breathing out his last, and then what — no power after that. A terrible outlook! Therefore the need of energy, and I am hoping that most here have some energy. It is essential to salvation. It is said of ^[p. 511] christians that we are raised from the dead by faith — not yet literally, but by faith — of the operation of God, that is, the energy of God; so that we do not sink as a stone when death comes. Think of the energy of the Lord Jesus in death! He delivered up His spirit. And this raises the whole question of resurrection.

There can be no salvation without resurrection, and so the Lord entered into death; He delivered up His spirit. He said no one could take His life from him. No one else could say that. “I lay it down of myself” (John 10: 18), He says. What a glorious fact that is as to Christ, as to our Saviour! “I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again”. He had power, energy in Himself. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up”, John 2: 19. And so it is if all of us should die. The Lord will come to the grave’s mouth, as He did to Lazarus’ grave. “Now it was a cave, and a stone lay upon it”, John 11: 38. He says to them, “Where have ye put him?”. That is what Elisha says, Where is it? We must get the spot. “Where have ye put him?” says the Lord. Martha says, “He stinks already, for he is four days there. Jesus says to her, Did I not say to thee, that if thou shouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?” (verses 39, 40). It is an evangelical matter. The glory of God enters into evangelical meetings, “Where have ye put him?”. Why should the Lord have to ask? He knew, but He would have us to know. Where did this iron fall in? A person might say, It fell into the river. No, that will not do. Heaven requires much more detail, and so it is the graves of all the saints are known there. All the epitaphs have remembrance in heaven. Let us be careful what we put on! “Asleep through Jesus” — “Unknown, and well known”. Heaven knows them. The Lord knows where they are. Abraham, typically Christ, bought a ^[p. 512] burying place for the saints. The Lord knows where they are, and gives a great touch to the burials of those who fall asleep through Jesus. “Where have ye put him?”. There it is. It is a cave and there is the stone. There is the Machpelah of each one. That is the burial place of the saints. The Lord will come there; the chapter says so. The Lord shows He is really most sympathetic and inquires of us as to what we know about our dead.

Well, Elisha cut down wood and cast it in. The iron had not been cast in; it fell in. It was a borrowed iron. Elisha would not have a borrowed article. He was used of God according to the divine right of property. Where has it fallen? Well, the stick of wood was cast in there, and the iron did swim. What a triumph! There is nothing more about the stick of wood. It is not said that the wood swam. “The iron did swim”, the Spirit of God says. We come out in power, but it is the power that worketh in us already; so the Lord, as I said, knows all those who had been buried in Machpelah, that is, the burying place of the saints. He knows where they are. It is an awful thing to be cremated. It is an unnatural thing to have it done. Nobody who is a christian should do it. “And many bodies of the saints fallen asleep arose”, Matthew 27: 52. They arose. How did they arise? — from the energy in them; and so it is, if there is to be an arising in a spiritual sense, there must be energy there. Energy is available. The iron did swim. It was a vicarious matter. There is no possibility of any of us swimming in this sense save as a vicarious matter. The death of our Lord Jesus Christ is vicarious, but His resurrection is as vicarious as His death is. “Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures; and that he was buried; and that he was raised the third day, according to the scriptures”, 1 Corinthians 15: 3, 4. He has been raised for our justification (Romans 4: 25).

^[p. 513] Paul goes further in Colossians. We are “also raised with him through faith of the working of God who raised him from among the dead” (chapter 2: 12). It was faith in us, so we swim in the light of resurrection. The power of swimming is what I am seeking to stress. On the fifth day in creation, the fowls flew in the air, and the fish swam in the sea. They are living souls. So it is that going back to the chapter that asserts the rights of God in His creation, we find that those that have fins and scales are clean. The fins enable the fish to go through. They do not float, nor did the iron float. It is the swimming; that is the point; the energy typically in it. One looks for some little energy in souls here, lethargic naturally but the power of the evangelical spirit in the meeting stimulating to a little bit of energy which you perhaps have never yet exercised. It may be there now, and the Spirit of God would just stir you up to a little bit of energy. They say to Peter, “What shall we do, brethren?” Acts 2: 37. That is the question. That supposes energy. Peter did not say, We can do nothing. No, because they could do something; and what they did first was to repent, and that needs energy. Do not be ashamed of it. If there is anything to be repented of — and let nobody say that there is not, for if he says that, that man is not telling the truth. Peter says, Repent. “Repent, and be baptised, each one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for remission of sins, and ye will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit”. You will get greater energy. It needs energy to repent. Unrepentant people just float down the stream. The river down here, the Genesee, is just thick with mud right now. People falling in will go out of sight; but you can escape that. Keep your head above it; that is the point. The stream may be murky, indeed the world itself is corrupt, but the fins enable you to go against it, and the scales shut out the evil, the ^[p. 514] filth that it carries down in its flood. So the iron did swim; it did not float. That is all, and the man who lost it is told to take it back. That is salvation.

Well, now, this links on with what I read in the Acts. It is a well-known scene in the great apostle’s life. The ship was fairly big, not quite so big as Noah’s ark, but it accommodated two hundred and seventy-six souls, and they were all in danger of being lost. The word ‘swim’ is brought in twice in the saving process. The soldiers were the killing element there. It is an awful time at the present, killing elements that exist among men. Human life is cheap, it is an awful thing to contemplate the killing power of the present time; and so it was in Paul’s day — human life was cheap, too. There were not so many living in those days as there are now. The population of the world was not nearly so large then, but there were a good many, and the soldiers were here with Paul, and all the persons (we do not know who they were, but Paul was there and Luke and a few others), but the killing element was bent on destroying them because they were prisoners, and the devil was behind it because they were God’s servants. But God had His eye on His servants, and they are to be saved. The soldiers would appoint them to be killed. We do not want to have anything to do with the killing business. The saving business belongs to us, and so it was that the saving business in this instance belonged to the centurion, although he was ordained to order them to be killed. He was a Roman military officer. It was a killing time, but the sailors remained with them. The only hope of the ship, Paul said, was the presence of the sailors. Sailors are not necessarily killing men. They are very essential for marine service, but they wanted to save themselves and let the others die. Christians are not like that. The sailors pretended to do so-and-so but they thought to escape out of the ship. Paul,

^[p. 515] however, was a saving person. We are here on the line of salvation. “For this is good and acceptable before our Saviour God, who desires that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth”, 1 Timothy 2: 3, 4. He is a Saviour God. The Son of man came to save men’s lives, and so Paul was on the saving line. There were two hundred and seventy-six souls on that ship, and I have no doubt he preached to all on board, and God said through His angel, ‘You are going to have them all; God has given to you all them that are in the ship’. I do not mean to say they were saved spiritually, but they were saved anyway physically, and that was because of Paul who was on the saving line. Christians should not be on the killing line; they are to be on the saving line. Paul says to the soldiers, ‘Do not try to kill me, but if you do not watch those sailors, they will leave the ship, and we shall all be lost’. Paul was on the saving line, and even the sailors served and the officers, the master of the ship, too. The soldiers did their job, though as far as the sailors were concerned, their attempts would have meant destruction.

We are not to be inattentive to the needs of men around us, whatever they be. “Let us do good towards all”, Galatians 6: 10. If you can do anything to save, do it. That is the idea of christianity. The saving principle pervades the whole system of christianity, and the time came when things looked very bad. Paul had the light in his soul. What a comfort it is to care about and obtain the salvation of christians. You say, If they are elect, what is the need of bothering about them? But Paul would say, “For this cause I endure all things for the sake of the elect, that they also may obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory”, 2 Timothy 2: 10. What a fine accompaniment! What great and glorious days he had! These so-called ‘gospel meetings’ are so that we may secure “^[p. 516] as many as were ordained to eternal life”, Acts 13: 48. Paul knew that two hundred and seventy-six souls were to be saved, but he is going to see that they are saved. God in His operations is in mind. It is what God can do at any time — change minds to accomplish His purpose. So this is no accidental matter, no mere disaster in the Mediterranean Sea, near the island of Malta. No, it is governed by the sovereign arrangement of God, and so is this meeting. If there is one here elected to be saved, you will be saved; but it is my business to see that you are saved, and saved now. The devil does his best to hinder you, but I am here to remind you of that. It is a preacher’s business to see that his hearers are saved, that you may receive into an honest and good heart “the implanted word, which is able to save your souls”, James 1: 21. It is a question of present energy in souls that they may be saved; to know how to throw off the things that hold you down, so that you swim instead; you have the power of life in your soul. What a great victory it is to see a person swimming, who has been lethargic and worldly, now using the energy that belongs to christianity to go against the tide. That becomes your salvation, for that is what happened in Noah’s time. They were saved as through water. It was their own doing. I am pressing now, What about your own doing? Perhaps once there was energy that you felt a little of when you repented, but you need to keep on repenting for you need to do it all the time.

“He that believes and is baptised shall be saved”, Mark 16: 16. If there is anybody here unbaptised, there is a word for you. It is essential to salvation. It is your matter. You cannot do it yourself; another has to do it, but you can see that it is done. It belongs to salvation. “He that believes and is baptised shall be saved” — whether before or after conversion, it holds good. It is taken on as essential ^[p. 517] and becomes virtue — a very important matter. See to that! It is a matter of energy. There is much carelessness in these days, whereas God is most energetic all the time, and the preachers are too, if they are worth the name. They are energetic, praying or speaking, agonising, visiting to get people saved. “Be saved from this perverse generation” (Acts 2: 40); that is, save yourselves from this world, and be a saved creature. Keep out of it, because getting in it, you are just in the stream floating down, as I might say. The energy is in the stream, not in you; but in swimming, the energy is in you and not in the stream, and that is where salvation lies. And so the centurion commanded those who were able to swim to cast themselves first into the sea. Salvation is with them. He had no idea that departing from the ship is a means of salvation. He was not an ecclesiastical man at all. The centurion was not on that line. He knew the power of water, so he says, ‘As many as can swim’. Who is there here that can swim that has not begun again? As far as I know, once you have learned to swim, you never forget how; you can always do it. You may not have done it for years. I do not know that I have done it for years, but I know I could do it. The centurion says, It is a question of how many men here can swim; you just get into the water. And they did. The soldiers said, Let us kill them all. They think nothing of human life. They said, “Lest any one should swim off and escape”. Satan would hold them there so that they might go down and be engulfed in the waters of death, the Mediterranean waters where Jonah was, too. It does not say that he went down like a stone. He was cast in. That is remarkable, too. The time comes when Jonah is cast in. He is brought down by another. He had been doing his own will to get away from Jehovah. Think of him using his energy to get away from ^[p. 518] Jehovah! He told his shipmates that, too. They knew it, and he told them what they had to do. He was cast in, but he did not go down like a stone. He went down to the bottom vigorously. The great fish was living. It was energetic. He went down to the bottoms of the mountains, the weeds were wrapped about his head, he says, but energy was there, and he cried to Jehovah out of the belly of Sheol, and he ends up by blessing Jehovah. And Jehovah commanded the fish, and it vomited up Jonah on dry land. There would be nothing without energy in these matters. Carelessness in these matters is abominable to heaven, and I would urge every one here, that if you have ever so little energy, use it now. Now is the time. Those that can swim, says the centurion; and they swam ashore. Others got something out of the ship, something from the ship, whether boards or not it does not say, but something from the ship, meaning ecclesiastically some assembly principles. Ordinary christian assembly principles help you to get ashore, but swimming is the thing, energy to get out of the thing that is endangering us, if we are not saved. I hope I have said enough to show you the power of energy spiritually.

And so it is with Ezekiel, according to the third scripture. He followed the increase of depths or measure. It is a remarkable experience, only he reached the impassable period. There was plenty of water. It was all experienced by him. It was no question of losing his life. These waters have to be taken account of differently from the Jordan. The Jordan is the river of death, but this river that Ezekiel saw is the river of life and has its origin in the house of God. It is a living stream. Young christians come into things gradually, first to the ankles; then they get a little further to the knees; and then to the loins; and then finally waters to swim in, living, fructifying, vivifying waters. Presently ^[p. 519] Ezekiel sees trees growing by the banks. There is not time to say anything more, but these waters are waters to swim in. Nobody can pass over it. When we come to waters to swim in, we feel we are in the very centre of things, where the river of God’s grace flows in the Spirit. We are happy to be here. I am. There is always refreshment in the meetings. It is no mere pool. It is moving waters where there is oceanic depth and breadth. I could not pass over it and neither can you nor can anybody. We have come to infinitude, and that is christianity. You do not want anything more. Everything the soul desires is in this river, the water of life.

What I am saying now is to lead us into still greater depth of waters to swim in, actually through the use of your vital powers to make progress, to go forward, for that is the idea, to have the energy to go forward.