I'm going to repeat the three
passages of Scripture around which our
thoughts were gathered this afternoon. Two of them
in the prophecies of Jeremiah, the overall passage in chapter 17 and verse 12:
"A glorious throne, set on high from the beginning,
is the place of our sanctuary".
And then under that from the
first chapter, the end of verse 5:
"I have appointed thee a prophet unto the nations".
And in the book of
the Acts, chapter 1, verse 8:
"Ye shall receive power when the Holy Spirit is
come upon you; and ye shall be My witnesses both in
Jerusalem, and in all Judaea and Samaria, and unto
the uttermost part of the earth".
"A prophet unto the nations...", "witnesses unto
the uttermost part of the earth..." and "a glorious
throne, set on high from the beginning, is the place
of our sanctuary."
We have already covered a considerable amount of
ground in laying down a foundation for these
meditations. The sum and the substance of it all is
that the call of God is a call into fellowship with
Himself in a great purpose which has been in His
heart from the foundation of the world. That is the
meaning of being the Lord's: it is a fellowship call, it is a vocation call. It is
therefore something very much more than a call to be
saved. That is only the door into the fellowship,
and into the vocation.
Now this evening
we're going, without any backward
look, we are going to go on with that. And once
more we outline, and I want to here mention six
parts of that whole matter of fellowship with
God in vocation. And, of course, what I am
saying, although without quoting the Scripture, is
fully based upon and supported by what the Word of
God teaches.
Firstly then:
[1.] This world was made for
and given by God to His Son as His possession and
inheritance.
That lies back of everything in history and in the
Bible. It lies back of human life. It lies back of
everything that the Bible contains. God designed
this world and created it for His Son, and gave it
to Him as His inheritance.
Secondly:
[2.] The world was stolen from God's Son.
Something that runs through the Bible, and breaks
out from the prophets again and again is that God
has been robbed. God has been robbed. God has had
His rights taken from Him.
God's rights are vested in His Son, and that taking
from God relates to the place of God and His Son in
this world. And it is not
difficult to see that on the one side, the big issue
all along is just that. It is just
that: God has not got His place or His
rights; they have been taken from Him. If we could
comprehend the whole meaning of one big Bible word,
and understand it, we should see that it just comes
back to this thing - that word ‘righteousness'. The
whole of the content of the word ‘righteous' relates
to what is right where God is concerned; and
righteousness and unrighteousness bear down upon
this one issue: God having His place, and being
ceded His rights; His rights in character, His
rights in creation, and His rights in government.
Well, they are things said - they are big things,
and cover a lot of ground. But this point is that
this world has been stolen from God's Son.
True, by man's consent, but however
and why for, that's not our matter at the moment.
The simple fact is that it is in wrongful hands; it
is in hands to which it does not belong. You
know, God has written that truth deep and large in
history.
I wonder if you have ever yourself wondered about
one matter... Do you
remember, in a vision God came to Abraham to make a
covenant with him, and said: "Thy seed, thy seed
shall be sojourners in a foreign land
four hundred years". Before
they were in existence, they were destined to the
Egyptian captivity and bondage, or it was foreshown
that they would be. I have often asked myself when
reading the story of Joseph going into Egypt, then
bringing his brethren there, and his aged father,
and the seemingly happy time for the present that
was theirs, why it was necessary for that to become
a prison for them for those four hundred years, and
as we know, an awful prison. We know the bondage and
how they cried and groaned by reason of that bondage
and their taskmasters. Why? Well, we know
that Joseph's brethren were not very good kind of
fellows, a poor lot perhaps; they didn't
treat him very well, but four hundred years!
If it was for what they were
that they should not have been, this was pretty
heavy punishment! Why? And determined or foreknown
long before they were the bad men they were, before
they were men at all. Why must
this long and terrible period be written in history?
Well, we may not and I may not understand the whole
thing, but I do suggest this: God has written deep
and large on the page of history, that this world is
in the hands of a power to which it does not belong.
While they were there during that period in
Pharaoh's hands, they did not belong to
Pharaoh, they did not belong to Egypt. And
God's words were: "My people... let My people go...
let My son go...". In effect, ‘They don't
belong to you; you have no right over them; they
belong to Me.' Now perhaps we could find a very much better and fuller reason
for Israel later going into the seventy years'
captivity in Babylon, for, we might say, they
deserved that; you have only to read these
prophecies of Jeremiah. Nevertheless, there is another
aspect, another side to it. That people remained
God's people in Babylon; they did not belong to
Nebuchadnezzar; they did not belong to Babylon; they
were God's people in wrongful and false
government and control. God has written this in
history. There is that which is God's which is under
a false, wrongful government and control and mastery. It is not where it ought to
be, it's not in His hands; it has been stolen from
God. Truly, as Pharaoh stole Israel, and Israel's
rights,
and properties, and liberties;
as truly as Nebuchadnezzar stole the wealth of the
temple, and of the city, and the people, and carried
it away, so in a fuller, and deeper, and of course a
spiritual way (which is much, much
worse than the temporal) this
world which belongs to God has been stolen
from God. He is not in
possession of it. It has been stolen; God has been
robbed. God's Son has been robbed of His
inheritance.
Thirdly:
[3.] This world, therefore,
is, in the deepest sense, a lost world.
A lost world. Of course, lost, firstly, to its
Owner, its rightful Owner; lost to the purpose for
which it was created; lost to its own rightful state
of peace, joy and satisfaction. It is lost to all
that. It is lost to its essential unity and
integration, lost to that - that of course needs no
arguing or belabouring. It is
lost to its glory. It's a lost world. All in it, by nature,
are lost. The nations are lost. Now, of course the
Lord Jesus made it His business to lay great
emphasis upon that fact by every means: by parable
and declaration, and by work and Person, He sought
to make this quite clear to all, that the
inheritance is lost. Yes, and that it had been
stolen. Remember the parable of the vineyard, and
the wicked husbandman, who said: ‘This is the heir,
the heir to whom the
inheritance belongs. Come, let us kill him, and the
inheritance shall be ours.' Oh, what a profound
meaning the Lord Jesus had in speaking that parable.
We know all His other parables about lost things. We
have dwelt mainly upon one side of them. There is
another side, you know. Take the one best known, of
the ‘prodigal' so-called.
Well, we have gone round that ‘prodigal' looking at
him from every standpoint, until perhaps we think
that there is nothing more to be said. But have you
ever thought that he didn't belong
to the man to whom he had hired himself out, and he
did not belong to that world into which he
had gone, and he did not belong to the
circumstances and condition in which he found
himself? There is something in him all the time,
rising up in revolt, and saying: "I don't belong
here; this is not what I was made for!
My whole being cries out and says: I am in a false
position; I am in a wrong position.
I am where I ought not to
be. I should not be in
this."
If the coin or the sheep could speak,
those
lost things, they would have said the same thing: "I
am not where I ought to be, I'm somewhere else. This
is not what I was intended for". So, when the Lord
Jesus sums it all up and says: "The Son of Man came
to seek and to save that
which was lost", He's touching
the ultimate things, the ultimate things...
not just the things of man's
salvation in that elementary sense, but man's
salvation in its profoundest, uttermost, sense: the
recovery of that which has been lost to God's
Son - His inheritance. Well, there's nothing perhaps
new to you about that, but we're on the way. This
world was made for and given by God to His Son, it
was stolen from Him by a power that has no real
right over it, it is therefore a lost world.
But then fourthly:
[4.] God's Son came into this world
with the supreme object of
recovering the inheritance to
Himself...
Of again retrieving the lost, and securing the lost
inheritance to Himself, as its rightful
Owner. That, again, is perhaps the simple gospel,
but let us get back of everything and see what it is
that lies there at the root of His coming: leaving
everything, leaving everything...
being divested of everything in heaven and coming
here, and coming to the day of which
we are thinking today, even the death on the cross. The thing that lies
right at the heart of all that is the recovery of
His inheritance.
Now let me solemnly and reverently touch a point
which goes deeper than anything else in this matter.
When the Lord Jesus on the cross, cried, "Eli, Eli,
lama sabachthani" He went out into the lost place, the place
of the lost; the place where the scapegoat was
loosed and driven to the wilderness, away from man
and God. He took the place of a lost world, and a
lost humanity. He has lost
everything in that moment. It is the desolation of
His soul. For that moment He's lost God, lost
heaven, yes, lost everything.
It is a terrible phrase, and I hesitate to use it -
He was like a ‘lost soul' in that moment.
We say it with some support that He
poured out His soul unto death. Unto
death! What is death but the loss of
everything? If it is death all is gone. And He went
out there to bring back in His own Person the lost
inheritance of man. He touched to the very depths,
to the bottom of our loss, and God's loss, and His
own loss. Oh, the wonder of
the resurrection! It's
essential to the whole circle.
But, you see, this world was
lost. But even that,
dear friends is not all. That's all true, that's all true,
but there is an
extra factor in it all;
an extra factor and element in it
all.
[5. Christ triumphed over the powers of darkness
in His cross]
Out there in that darkness and desolation, that
wilderness of forsakenness, things were by no means
passive. Out there He went to meet the one who had
robbed Him and God of everything; whom He Himself called "the prince of this world". Out there as
truly, and yet more truly and more
fully than the combat of the forty days after His
baptism with the prince of this world, He
met the usurper. He met the false prince,
He met the robber, the stealer, and in
awful conflict in that darkness, He wrestled His
great wrestle with the powers of darkness; so
terrible that the Psalmist well describes them:
"They compassed me about like bees... they compassed me about like bees", these
hosts of wicked spirits, of which Paul speaks. Out
there He met that whole kingdom and hierarchy in full
force. "He plunged in His imperial strength to
depths of darkness down; He brought His trophy up at
length; the proud usurper's
crown." He wrested the inheritance from the false
prince. He fought this whole
battle out in that dark moment on the cross. Oh,
what a lot can be crowded into a few moments - an eternity can
be! So it was with Him.
You
see, the Cross, the Cross was a far, far bigger thing than a crucifix,
than a crucifixion. It is
cosmic, it compasses the whole range of heaven and
earth. That's all focussed on that spot in that moment. He fought it through, did
spiritual combat with the prince of this world and
his hosts, and He triumphed by His Cross. He
stripped off, says Paul, "the principalities and the
powers, and made a show of them openly, triumphing
over them in His cross".
That's number five. Number six:
[6.] As the
Victor Prince He returned from the
fight, brought
back by the power of God, and coming
back, He calls His fellow-heirs to
the vocation of possessing the
inheritance with Him.
Taking the inheritance which
He has secured in Himself, He
calls them "fellow-heirs". And you know that is a
Scripture: "heirs of God, and
joint-heirs with Jesus Christ". He calls them to
this great vocation and conflict of the
inheritance. That is the meaning of the Christian
life, of being a Christian:
"Called into the fellowship with His Son", called as ‘fellow-heirs' with
Him to share the inheritance with Him, but called
into the vocation of taking the inheritance and
fighting its battle. And it is unto all the nations,
to the uttermost part of the earth. The vocation of
every Christian... listen: the
vocation of every Christian,
that includes you individually, and me, is to have
our feet down on some patch on this earth in the
name of the Lord Jesus. And that
other one, with all his powers, will try to shift
you, to move you, to force you out, to drive you
out, to make it impossible for you to stay. But that
Name is sufficient; that Name is enough. He has won! Not in
our victory, but in His.
The methods of those evil forces are too many to
count and enumerate and mention, but I put my finger
upon one very favourite one,
which, no doubt, is a very live issue with you and
with me - the livest issue - and
that is as the ‘accuser of the brethren'. And if he cannot get us broken on
the matter of Christ's redemptive work for our
ultimate salvation, he will seek to cripple and
paralyse us on the ground of our unworthiness to be
the Lord's at all, and the Lord's servant. You know, it is the Lord's
servants who know the most about the work of the
accuser, because it is the vocation that he is
after. And this is an issue which is alive right to
the end. Dear friends, you
may think that you have got past the letter to the
Romans, and you have got into the letter to the
Ephesians. God help you! God help
you. If you will
allow the testimony of one who is not a novice and a
beginner in these things by any means, it is that I
need the letter to the Romans more today than ever
in all my Christian experience - the great truth of
justification by faith, or let me
put it in another way, the righteousness of God
which is through faith in Jesus Christ. You see, that is not only a
salvation truth, that's a battle truth, that's a warrior truth:
"No weapon that is formed against thee shall
prosper", says the prophetic word. And "every tongue
that riseth against thee in
judgement thou shalt condemn; this is the heritage
of the servants of the Lord..." is that true? It's true, it's all
true.
To what does it apply? Men
forge their weapons against the people of God, and
they succeed! Men raise their
tongues of accusation against the people of God, and
they succeed! Is it true? Apply it to the forces of
evil back of everything, and it's
true. Why? "And their
righteousness is of Me, saith
the Lord"; that cuts the ground from every accusation that is made. And
that bluntens every weapon of
the accuser. "Their righteousness..." - the
opposition of the enemy is along this line to make
you surrender to the idea of your
non-acceptance by the Lord, your rejection by the
Lord, your being set aside by the Lord because,
because look at you, what you
are! It is a terrible battle,
that! But "their righteousness is of Me" is
the letter to the Romans, and we need it in the
battle; we need it in the battle. We
need it to begin, and we need it at the end.
We are in this battle; we are called into it, for
the inheritance. The inheritance is not salvation.
We do nothing to earn salvation. The inheritance is
far, far more than that. He calls us into this
vocation of taking, taking His rights for Him.
I repeat, wherever
you are, in your home, in your business, in your
place of spiritual service, in any part of this
world, as in fellowship with Jesus Christ you are in
fellowship with this great vocation, to hold
that place for Him, in His Name; and not to
move until the Lord says, Move. The Lord
does move us, and tells us to move sometimes; but we
must have the Lord's word for it before we
do it, or the enemy will make a great mess of us.
Now there are three things in this sixth point. The
rightful and victorious Prince of this world calls
us as fellow-heirs into the vocation and conflict of
recovering the inheritance. That means that in the
very call into fellowship with God's Son
there is:
You never realise that conflict until you take
sides with Jesus Christ. It is then that it wakes
up. You find yourself almost immediately in some
atmosphere which is charged with antagonism -
without speaking or doing anything. You haven't got to get up and preach; it
is there! It is there, you
are aware of it. As you
go on with the Lord, and the
more you go on with the Lord, the more this very
atmosphere of antagonism grows upon you. It is not a
very comforting gospel this for you I know, but you
know it's true; and the more
you count for the inheritance, or the more anything
counts for the inheritance, the more violent the
conflict.
I can mention here, and it will be for your prayer, I had a long letter
during this week from a dear aged sister, whose name
is known to many of you, and whose writings perhaps
to more: the
writer of "God's Plan of
Redemption" [Mary McDonough]
one who has meant much for the Lord and the
inheritance through a long life. She is now lying in
a nursing home after a very bad accident, from which
it is doubtful she will recover, very much alone. And in her letter she said: "I am
the target of the assaults of the evil powers in a
way in which I have never known in my life. Pray for
me; ask your friends to pray for me." Here is one
who has meant much to the Lord in the matter of the
inheritance. You would say, "Well, it is time she
had the waters of quietness, that the Lord gave her
a calm evening." No.
But dear friends, that is no
isolated case. Everywhere those who really represent
some value for the Lord Jesus are having
that sort of thing; the pressure is intense.
Think of what is happening in some places. God only
knows what that dear servant of His in China
[Watchman Nee] now in his
seventh year of tortured imprisonment, what he knows
of it - the awful conflict. He doesn't
know, unfortunately, of the tremendous values of his
ministry. How he has kept us going here for months
with his ministry, with demands that can hardly be
met with that book or those books! [Probably referring to "The Normal Christian
Life" which was first published by "A Witness and A Testimony" at
Honor Oak] I wish he knew. But we
know! We know! If you saw the correspondence about
that book, hear the reports that we
get about it... tremendous things that it
is doing in many parts of the world, you would
understand then and
realise that
there is something in this suffering of his, and
this conflict. It is not for nought. It's like that. If you don't count much for the Lord you
will not know much about that, and there are many,
many Christians who are turning Christianity into a
mere picnic. A
good time... that's the idea of Christianity in
many circles alright. If you want to know what the
intrinsic value, the ultimate value is going to be,
and what the prince of this world (so-called) thinks
about it, he may be very pleased with a lot of it, but you may take it that the call into
fellowship with God's Son in this great vocation of
the inheritance has inherently in it the
element of conflict.
The second thing is that our business, in the first
instance, is to get for Christ the token out of
the nations.
The Token
Out of the Nations.
We are not told or taught in the Word of God, that
in the first place, the world will be won for
Christ. But we are told that the first thing
- and notice that that is how it is put - God
first looked to take out of the nations a
people for His Name, to take out of the
nations a people for His name - the
token of them. That is our
business. It is your business where you are in your
business, in the place where your feet are put down
to stand there, if by any means there shall be taken
a token of the inheritance in view of the Great Day.
That is what you are there for. Yes, common language
and parlance speaks about
soul-winning, and so on, but that is what it is. See
something bigger even than getting people ‘saved'
and brought to Christ. That's
important but there is something behind that. There
is this thing that dates back
to a dateless time, called ‘the beginning', which
was in the heart of God, and reaches through the
ages, on to the ages of the
ages; and one thing into that
you and I are called, is in
the first, practical instance:
to get the token out of the nations. It's a token, but a token, but it's a token. We are there for
that.
And thirdly:
The Ultimate
Possession Lies
Along that
Line, the Possession
of the Nations.
"Ask of Me and I will give thee the nations for
thine inheritance, and the uttermost part of the
earth for thy possession". That is to be fully
fulfilled and granted eventually. The kingdoms of
this world shall become the kingdom of our God and
of His Christ.
Can you suffer a few minutes longer? Because I want
to come to Jeremiah 17:12. The cost of all this is
great, as many of you well know; the conflict is
fierce. The demands upon us sometimes seem to be
immense and endless. The interests are so vital, so
vital that something is absolutely
necessary if we are going to get through. We must
have an adequate background for getting through. I
have not exaggerated, and even if you don't know what I am talking about,
believe me, some do! The involvements in this great
business are very, very great, and
very serious, and very exacting upon the
saints, necessitating some basis and background
which is adequate to meet it all, and go through.
And what is it? Oh, read
again Jeremiah if you have the patience to read
right through this long and terrible book. Hear this
man's groans and cries
and sighs
and troubles. Hear him saying: "Woe is me, my
mother, that you gave birth to a man of strife and
contention!" He is called ‘the weeping prophet', I think wrongly so, but he was a man who was right
up against this terrible business. Terrible business! When
at last they dropped him into
a deep, dark, miry pit, up to the breast, and left
him to starve and die had not a kindly Ethiopian,
hearing of his plight, gone to the king and begged
him to do something. The king gave commandment that
they should take ropes and bring up Jeremiah out of
the pit. And as Dr. Meyer says about it, there was
the extra touch of kindness and understanding even
with the Ethiopian when he took a lot of old rags
and clouts to put around the
rope to go under his arms, so that there should be
no unnecessary chaffing, and they fetched him up. That's the man. He goes through, he goes through all that
dear friends, to go through
it all, and if you feel sometimes
that it is a hard way and an impossible way to get
through, you need something, and you need
what Jeremiah had. And what did he have?
"A glorious throne, set on high, from the beginning,
is the place of our sanctuary."
Break that up, break it up: "A glorious throne" -
there is a seat of government in glory.
"Set on high" - above all
this, all this, above all of it, set on high. Not
yesterday or today, but from
eternity: "From the beginning" the throne has been there from the
beginning is an eternal throne, a timeless throne, set on high from the beginning,
"is our sanctuary...". Sanctuary! What picture does that
bring up to your eyes? Do you see the fugitive? You
see the one being pursued by the avenger of blood
running and rushing for his very life towards the
city of refuge, the place of sanctuary. The
glorious throne set on high from the beginning is
the place of our refuge, our sanctuary, our
security, our safety, our victory.
And when you come to think about it, not only
Jeremiah, but Isaiah fulfilled his ministry on the
strength of that: "In the year that Uzziah died I
saw the Lord, high and lifted up, and sitting upon a
throne..." and Isaiah had to go through things, and
it was that that carried him through. Ezekiel - "I
was by the river Chebar, and I saw visions of God.
The heavens were opened..." And what did he see?
"Above the firmament a throne, and above
it upon the likeness as that of a man."
What is the word that covers the book of Daniel? And
Daniel knew something about this conflict and cost:
"The heavens do rule". The heavens do rule, that is the word of Daniel isn't
it, the book? "The heavens do
rule... thou shalt know that the heavens do
rule...". And the same secret carried Paul through
all his sufferings and troubles - he had seen the
Lord Jesus high and lifted up in glory. It is only
as we do see God raised Him from the dead, and set
Him at His own right hand far above all rule and
authority, principality and power, and every name
that is named, highly exalted and given the Name
which is above every name; only so shall we get through.
But so shall we get through, if we see Him there,
know that He is there, and keep our eyes on Him
there - a glorious throne... on high... from of old... our sanctuary.