The Gospel According to the Old Testament
Seven Studies on Various Old Testament Books
by David Gooding
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1. Genesis
General Introduction to our Studies
Good evening, and first of all allow me to thank you most sincerely for the warmth of your welcome. Thank you too for your invitation, for the stimulus and encouragement it is to my own faith to see how vigorous and prosperous the work is that God is doing through you and in you in this part of his vineyard. In the short days that I shall be with you, I hope to get to know as many of you as possible. Thank you once more for all the encouragement that your Christian testimony is to me.
As you have heard, in the first session of each evening we shall be dealing with some kind of survey, not of the whole of the Old Testament but of some of its major books, and asking ourselves what the gospel message is in each book.
From the first division of the Old Testament, called the Law, we shall be dealing with Genesis and Leviticus. From the second division, the Former and Latter Prophets, we shall be dealing with 1 & 2 Kings, Ezekiel and Zechariah; and from the third division, the Writings, we shall be dealing with the first book of Chronicles. Again, I shall not be attempting to survey the whole of any one of these books in detail. What I shall do is to select one or possibly two of their major themes rather than an exhaustive exposition. My aim is to stimulate and guide your further studies into these parts of God’s holy word and specifically to ask ourselves, ‘What is the gospel message according to these books?’.
And so tonight we come to Genesis, for where else would a study of the Old Testament start? Let us prime our thinking by reading from the first few verses:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. (Gen 1:1–5)
Genesis is a very large book. In our English translations it consists of fifty chapters, which divide themselves into two parts. The first part tells the story of the creation of the world and of mankind, and it takes that story through the fall until the destruction under God’s judgment at the flood (1:1 to 9:29). The second part of the book begins with man1 after the flood and tells of God’s great programme of reconstruction and redevelopment. We shall be looking at the first part, which is devoted to the three stories of creation.
What is the gospel message according to the first part of Genesis?
Please notice that I said three stories. Many popular handbooks tell us that there are two stories of creation in the book of Genesis, and some handbooks dare to tell us that those two stories contradict each other. Neither statement is true. There are not two stories of creation in the book of Genesis, there are three; and those three stories do not contradict but complement each other. Just as in the New Testament the four Gospels tell us of the person of our Lord Jesus and his work from four different and complementary angles, so in the first part of the book of Genesis these three stories tell us of creation from three distinctly different points of view. They therefore complement each other and give us a rounded picture of the creation of the world and man’s part in it.
For some moments, then, let us give ourselves to isolating and studying the themes of these three creation stories that make up the first part of the book of Genesis.
| The first creation story | 1:1–23 | Creative acts and organizational arrangement |
| The second creation story | 2:4–4:26 | Man’s raison d’être |
| The third creation story | 5:1–9:29 | Man’s constitution |
The first creation story (1:1–2:3)
Creative acts and organizational arrangement
The first story tells us that creation was not made all at once, which we might suppose if we didn’t have a divinely inspired record in front of us. It tells us that creation was made in stages of creative acts that became ever more complex and complicated, leading at last to a climax and crowning point with the creation of man in God’s image who would have dominion over God’s good handiwork.
The gospel message in the first creation story
Man is the climax and crown of God’s creation. Man was designed by God, not to be some slave of mindless material and colossal elemental forces; certainly not to be the prisoner of chance. Man was made in God’s image as his viceroy, to have dominion over the works of God’s hand—to rule, to administer, to organize and to develop God’s world for him.
It puts its fist into those dark perversions of the truth that would tell us, on the one hand, that man is a slave to elemental spirit forces in the universe—if I may call it, the error of the East. And likewise into the error of the Western world, which tells us, on the other hand, that man is ultimately a slave to the blind, materialistic, mindless forces of matter.
Not merely does it tell of a series of creative acts culminating in the creation of man and man’s dominion; it sketches in for us a series of God’s organizational arrangements for our world, which also preach their lesson. They tell us on what terms man is to be viceroy in God’s universe: he will hold his dominion so long as man himself is utterly dependent upon God.
Let me therefore call your attention to some of these creative acts and their organizational details. In the story of day one, we read first of all of a creative act: ‘God said, “Let there be light”, and there was light’ (v. 3). And secondly, of the organizational arrangement for the lighting system of our world.
The Creation of Light
I don’t know whether you have recently pondered the lighting system of planet Earth. We’ve grown so used to it that I suspect we take it for granted, and maybe sometimes we fail to observe how deliberate and meaningful it is. I am not talking now merely of the how of the organization but of the why.
Let me just step aside to try and illustrate the difference. One evening I was walking along a road near my own university in Cambridge. On my left I had a psychologist, and on my right a mathematician. They were arguing about the difference between the question how and the question why. I think the psychologist had it in his head that the mathematician hadn’t quite understood the difference, so he said to the mathematician, ‘Do you see those beautiful yellow electric lights lighting up the road?’.
I see them,’ said the mathematician.
‘Tell me, why are those lights yellow?’
And the mathematician replied with very long words about sodium this and electrical that, and all sorts of chemical formulas, and what have you. It sounded very clever. When he had finished, the psychologist said, ‘I’m sorry, you’re wrong. That is how they are yellow; it’s not why they are yellow. They are yellow because the city fathers decided that yellow lights are the best form of light for this particular stretch of road.’
Now ask yourself why God arranged the lighting system of our world as he did. The Bible says that God called the light ‘day’, and the darkness he called ‘night’ (v. 5). Why did he do that when there already were two jolly good words: ‘light’ and ‘darkness’? Why add two more, ‘day’ and ‘night’? Why call the light ‘day’?
And you will say to me, ‘But sir, they’re not the same thing anyway. Light is always there; it never goes out.’
Yes, strictly speaking, light is not the day and day is not the light. Day is our ration of light. And likewise, the darkness doesn’t go out; it’s always there. The darkness is not the same thing as night, is it? Night is our ration of darkness. God has arranged things so that once in every twenty-four hours, we get a ration of light and a ration of darkness. Our little planet is made to twizzle round the sun, which is our source of light, and for roughly twelve hours a day we enjoy its light and warmth. It makes life itself and growth possible and we can proceed with our activities. But then, whether we are ready or not, whether our work is done or not, we are mercilessly twizzled out of the light into the darkness. There is nothing we can do about it, and we are made to wait for another twelve hours or so for our next ration of light, helplessly dependent on forces beyond our control.
Why do you think God did it that way? Please don’t say there was no other way, for God has a thousand and one ways he could have done it. He could have made us all phosphorescent or something, with little lights in our foreheads as the fish have. He could have given us a rather large cosmic switch or something to switch the light on when we wanted it and off when we didn’t want it. Why did he decide to have the light always there, but to ration it out to us with roughly twelve hours of light, which we call day, and roughly twelve hours of darkness, which we call night?
THE ORGANIZATIONAL ARRANGEMENT
I’m asking you, therefore, to notice not merely that the first creation story deals with creative acts; it deals also with organizational acts. And if we enquire about the why of the organization, we may find the clue to this particular section in the words of Jesus Christ our Lord, recorded in John’s Gospel chapter 11. His friend Lazarus was dead, and our Lord announced to his twelve disciples that he was about to depart into Judea. The disciples said, ‘Master, surely you’re not going into Judea again, for of late the Jews sought to stone you. Are you going there again?’ (see vv. 7–8). In answer to their problem, our Lord gave them an object lesson drawn from creation: in fact, from this very topic that we are now discussing, the organization of planet Earth’s light supply.
‘Are there not twelve hours in the day?’, said he. (There are, roughly speaking, in the Middle East.) ‘If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world.’ That is, the sun up in the sky. ‘But if anyone walks in the night, he stumbles, because’—and I’d ask you to take note of the proper and literal translation—‘the light is not in him’ (vv. 9–10).
It's a simple observation, isn’t it? But it’s remarkably true and exceedingly significant. ‘If anyone walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.’ Indeed, it is not in his world; it is nineteen million miles and more outside of it. Every time our little planet Earth twizzles round and puts us into the dark, and every time it twizzles back and brings us once more into the light, we are reminded of the fact that Earth is not a self-contained apartment that has its own lighting supply within its doors. Light and power are our number one essentials, and for them we are helplessly dependent on a source that is outside ourselves—nineteen million miles outside our planet. God himself could not have made it more abundantly clear that, whereas mankind was made to have dominion on this planet, the condition of his dominion is that man should learn he is not a self-contained autocrat. He is dependent on powers outside himself, outside his world, and ultimately on the Creator himself.
The lesson that our Lord drew from the physical lighting system of our planet is, of course, immediately to be paralleled at the deeper level of human experience. When it comes to moral and spiritual problems, there is a light that is not in us nor in our world. We are dependent on the source of moral goodness and spiritual light that lies outside ourselves, outside our world, which resides in the Creator himself.
I shall content myself for now with these comments on the first creation story. Similar lessons are taught on the other days in the increasing climax that leads to the creation of man.
The second creation story (2:4–4:26)
Man’s raison d’être
This creation story turns to another topic. It describes human life at its various levels: physical, aesthetic, moral and community life among others, and highest of all, spiritual life in fellowship with God. To understand what human life is, you must put together all the descriptions that you will find in the second creation story.
Running alongside that, of course, is the description of life’s opposite, namely death. For just as there is physical, aesthetic, moral, social and spiritual life, so there is death for humanity that has fallen into sin at each one of these levels. The gospel message in the second creation story
The gospel message in the second creation story
In particular, the second creation story tells us the reason man was originally made and gives us his raison d’être. For God’s pleasure and for his own enjoyment, he was made to till the ground from which he was taken, and to make something of the world. God set him an example by planting a garden in Eden and encouraged him to do likewise with the rest of the world. Man was made out of the dust of the ground too, and that little ‘parcel of ground’ walking about on two legs was to till the ground that lay around him.
Life was caring for the ground and the planet in fellowship with God. It was like a father giving his son a toy—maybe a clockwork train set, or nowadays an imitation rocket or something. The father and the boy sit on the floor, happily playing together with the toy, the father enjoying it as much as the boy, and perhaps a little more sometimes. Ah, but while they play together with this toy, something else is happening: a friendship is being formed between father and son that’s going to mature long after the toy is finished with and in the dustbin. God created a temporary planet Earth, put man on it and invited him to live and experience life at all its levels, developing this vastly complicated and glorious ‘toy’ in fellowship with God, such that when planet Earth is done there might not only be a friendship but a new relationship. Man will rise to become not merely a creature of God, but a son enjoying eternal fellowship with him.
That was the programme for man’s life. Alas, the story goes on to tell us how man was tempted to redefine what life is. For the serpent came and told Eve to look at the tree of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. When he spelled out his proposal to her, she saw that the tree was good for food—life at the physical level; it was desirable to look upon, a thing of beauty—life at the aesthetic level (the arts, the beauty of life); and it would make one wise—life at the intellectual level.
‘Look at it,’ said Satan, ‘that’s life. Get your physical fill with arts and aesthetics, enjoy your intellectual life. Put them all together, and that’s all there is to life. The word of God is nonsense. It’s just legendary stuff aimed at keeping you in subservience. Cut out the word of God and this fellowship with him that dampens your spirit and tries to keep you from true evolutionary development. Banish God and his word and learn to live. Life is simply physical, aesthetic and intellectual enjoyment, without any fellowship with God.’
So man was deceived into reconceiving and redefining life, and what a bitter thing it was. He found this new definition a recipe not for life but for a kind of living death. When it is divorced from fellowship with God through his word, mere physical, aesthetic and intellectual life is death already begun. On that day man died spiritually, and spiritual death was eventually followed by physical death.
GOD HAD A REDEMPTION PLAN
But the story tells us that God had his plan for man’s redemption, which he began to sketch in even at that early stage. There was the news that one day ‘the seed of the woman will bruise the serpent’s head’ (see Gen 3:15). But until he came, man was put under the discipline of hard labour. The work that should have been a playtime, a pastime and a gentleman’s occupation, became the hard labour of a convict and a prisoner in a labour camp. It would remind man that without God he is a fallen creature; that life without God is not life but a living death, and it would urge man back to seek that fount of life, eternal life with God, without which all else must in the end come to frustration, vanity and corruption. The way back to God was initiated through sacrifice and the promise of a coming redeemer.
Further rebellion against God
But the second creation story has not finished yet, for it wants to tell us that man went even further away from God. If his raison d’être was to till the ground for God, what a wretched failure he has been. He has introduced into God’s world the element of rebellion and sin. Not only is God’s world being filled with thorns and thistles, it is being populated with a race of immoral rebels, all descended from Adam himself. What a wretched gardener man has been! It was for his sake, then, that the earth was cursed.
But that wasn’t the end of the story, for in chapter 4 we read that man went on to further rebellion and rejected the way back to God. Abel brought the divinely appointed sacrifice as the way back to God, but Cain tried to come to God as though sin had never been, or as if it didn’t really matter. He thought he could walk into God’s presence and find acceptance merely as a good gardener, without first acknowledging that he was a sinner in need of redemption.
Today there are many people who imagine they can find acceptance with God simply by being a good mother, a good father, a good businessman or a good school teacher. They fail to acknowledge that these things are useless, unless first they acknowledge their need of redemption through the sacrifice of Christ.
THE WAY OF CAIN
Cain went further. When God admonished him to repent of his stiff-necked obstinacy and to come by the way of redemption, Cain burst out into a deeper rebellion. In effect, he said to God, ‘If you won’t have my way, neither will you have Abel’s way,’ and he murdered Abel. What do you imagine God did with him? What would you have done?
Suppose you had a gardener and you said to him, ‘I want you to grow tomatoes here, not orchids, please. I don’t want orchids.’ But when you come back, you find the garden full of orchids and not a tomato in sight. You say, ‘I told you straight that I wanted tomatoes, not orchids. Why have you grown orchids?’
And the man turns round to you and says, ‘My good sir, I like orchids and I don’t like tomatoes, so I planted orchids. If you should appoint any other gardener to grow tomatoes, I will shoot him.’
What would you say to a gardener like that? I fancy you would say, ‘Well, goodbye. You needn’t be my gardener anymore. You can go and grow orchids on your own allotment. Here are your cards, get going.’
When Adam sinned there was discipline, but there was also a way of redemption. When Cain sinned (I say it respectfully and reverently), God gave the man his cards. ‘Look, Cain,’ he said, ‘you were originally made to till the ground for me; that is the raison d’être of your existence. I shan’t kill you, but you might as well go, for now when you work the ground it shall not yield its strength to you at all’ (see Gen 4:12).
Do I hear somebody saying, ‘I wish my boss would tell me that! I’m tired of work; what a wonderful holiday it would be to be dismissed and set free’?
Ah, but for God to dismiss you, that is hell. We didn’t make ourselves; we are creatures of God, made to do his will. Find me a man who has ultimately rebelled against doing his creator’s will to the point where the creator himself has dismissed him, and you have someone whose existence is now utterly meaningless. Though he exists for all eternity, you will not find any meaning, purpose, point or reason in his existence—nothing but a meaningless, pointless, frustrating existence. He has rebelled against the very purpose and person for whom he was created.
It is true that Cain’s posterity was foremost in the invention of many of the arts and some technologies and sciences. Arts, technology and science are delightful occupations, if done in fellowship with God; but outside that fellowship they will in the end lead to eternal frustration. Man was made to live and serve God, and if he is dismissed from his only fundamental raison d’être, then that is hell begun—the beginning of an eternal frustration. Many a man and woman in our modern society is precisely there, having rebelled against God and refused the way back. They are living, living, living; but it’s a living death that is ultimately pointless because it’s purposeless and doomed to end in the frustration of an eternity apart from God.
The third creation story (5:1–9:29)
Man’s constitution
Then there is a third creation story, which tells us something different from the other two. It starts at the beginning again, at the creation of man; but it goes off on a different angle to discuss not the purpose for which man was made nor the place man holds in God’s universe, but rather the constitution of man.
This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man [Hebrew ādām] when they were created. (Gen 5:1–2)
The gospel message in the third creation story
What is man? We’ve seen so many thousands that we no longer feel any element of surprise when we see a man. There was a day, however, when the world was new and man was a very exciting thing; the likes of him had never been seen before. There had been angels before, but they were spirits. Animals had been created, but now there came this new thing. Was it part animal, for it had a stomach, legs, lungs and all other such things that animals have? And yet it wasn’t just animal. Man is spirit and able to have fellowship with the Father of spirits. What would you call this new thing? God called it Adam 2 that is, Man.
Unlike the angels, men and women are part animal and able to reproduce, yet evidently also spirit with a tremendous potential. Subsequently, a man was born into this world called Enoch. Having lived here for many years, he was translated so that he should not see death (5:24). Without dying, he was taken by God into that other realm, that is, into the presence of God.
You say, ‘Was man made with that potential?’
He was indeed. And we are assured that what happened to Enoch shall one day happen to thousands of mankind. When the Lord Jesus comes, you will see a potential in man that perhaps you hadn’t noticed before, for not only shall the dead be raised, but living men and women shall be changed. They shall be caught up and taken into the presence of God to live in that spiritual realm; human still, but transformed with a different kind of human body (1 Cor 15:51–53; 1 Thess 4:13–18). This is a thrilling story.
WHAT IS THE CONSTITUTION OF MAN?
But now, in the developing tale of man’s sin and the fall, you must hear what sin did to man’s constitution. God announces his judgment on fallen humanity: ‘My spirit shall not always abide in man, for he is flesh’ (see Gen 6:3). That is to say, God is commenting upon man’s constitution. Fallen man is now spiritually dead, cut off from the Father of spirits and has constitutionally become a freak. ‘My spirit shall not always abide in man, for he is . . .’—notice the verb. It’s commenting upon what man is, what his constitution is—‘for he is flesh’. Man, as originally made, was not merely flesh but spirit, and not merely spirit but flesh. When man sinned, he died spiritually. That left him with flesh, and what happens to flesh in man when he dies spiritually?
God now sets about a very vivid and rather gruesome object lesson. When man became a freak constitutionally, God was not prepared to maintain him forever and therefore was determined to destroy the whole race. He did not burn them up, as subsequently he burned Sodom and Gomorrah, but he drowned them.
Now I suspect all of you will have observed what happens physically if you drown a man. Don’t try it yourselves, this is just for the sake of illustrating a point! If you get hold of a physical body and submerge it in water for five minutes, when you bring it out, the body is still there, isn’t it? Have you still got the man? Well, you’ve got the flesh bit, but something has gone out of him, ‘the breath of the spirit of life’ (Gen 7:22 NASB): the breath that comes out of his mouth. And when that departs, you’re left with a lump of flesh, which presently goes rotten and corrupt.
In that physical judgment, notice a parable at the deeper level of what sin did to humanity. Man was made of flesh and spirit—not just breath but God-given spirit. When man spiritually rebelled against God and spiritually died, you were left with what the Bible calls a carnal man, a fleshly man that becomes corrupt, both morally and spiritually, and ends by being what God never intended (see 1 Cor 3:3 KJV).
God’s means of salvation
From that sad state, God devised an early example of salvation. He told Noah to build an ark in which he might hide (Gen 6). Inside that ark he would go through the judgment, be buried in the waters, disappear from the sight of God, and then come out the other side to be the beginning of a new life and a new race on a newly constructed earth.
Those who know anything of Christian doctrine cannot resist the temptation to see a parable there. Fallen man is carnal, fit only to be destroyed from the presence of God. But in Jesus Christ our Lord, God has provided a means of salvation. Not merely an escape from judgment, but a way through the judgment, so that in Christ our substitute the believer can say, ‘I have been through God’s judgment; I have accepted death and burial, and I’ve risen on the other side to walk in newness of life’.
Walking in newness of life through the work of the Holy Spirit
Finally, Noah was not left to his own devices to step out of his ark into that fair new world. He was guided by birds, so the ancient record says, and in particular by a dove (see Gen 8:6–12). Similarly, when our Lord rose from the waters of baptism in Jordan’s river, the record tells us that a bodily form like a dove descended upon him (Luke 3:22). We know that this was the gracious person of the Holy Spirit, who was pleased at that time to take the form of a dove. He proceeded to lead our blessed Lord, first into the wilderness to be tempted, and then throughout the rest of his holy ministry, which was performed in the power of the Holy Spirit.
This also gives us an example of what Christ is prepared to do for us. Having accepted identification with him in his death, burial and resurrection, we are not left to our own devices and power. We too receive the Holy Spirit, who anoints us as he anointed him, and that gracious Spirit leads us to walk in newness of life to the pleasing of God and to our own endless spiritual profit. In both the Old and New Testaments this is how God describes his plan for the reconstruction of man’s constitution, once ruined by the fall but restored through Jesus Christ our Lord and the work of his Holy Spirit.
So there are three creation stories in the first part of Genesis. It would be good if we could cover the three stories of God’s redevelopment programme that fill the second part, but time forbids us and we must leave our study there.
Let’s just ask God’s help to remember and profit from his word.
O God, we thank thee for this part of thy holy word, for its grand and great concepts. Whereas we are saddened to read of the fall of our forefather, we thank thee for thine enthusiasm that early devised these foreshadowings of salvation to guide men and women towards the coming of him in whom thy full salvation should be found. Implant thy word on our minds, give us understanding thereof, we beseech thee, and grant us too to find refuge in Christ and the leading of thy Spirit that shall fit and train us for that fair new world that thou art devising and one day will implement when thy plans in Christ have reached their fulfilment. In his name we ask these things, giving thanks. Amen.
2. Leviticus
In our survey of the Old Testament, tonight we are to consider the book of Leviticus. Let us introduce ourselves to the study by reading some verses from it:
And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them, ‘You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy’. (19:1–2)
You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the LORD. (19:18)
And I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that you should not be their slaves. And I have broken the bars of your yoke and made you walk erect. (26:12–13)
May God illuminate our minds with his holy word.
What is the gospel message according to Leviticus?
The lesson of Leviticus is well summed up in the constantly repeated phrase to be found in that book, God’s word to his ancient people Israel: ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy’. That is the gospel message in the book of Leviticus. And we will immediately recognize that this injunction is equally applicable to us who are Christians. It is repeated by Peter as God’s direct command to us, equally as to Israel: ‘but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy’ (1 Pet 1:15). Therefore, as we read this ancient book, it will require very little adjustment for us to see its application to our daily lives.
The different emphases of the Old and New Testaments on holiness
Bodily, physical and spiritual holiness
Of course, as Christians we shall notice some things that are a trifle strange. In the standards that God set Israel for their observance of holiness, special and considerable emphasis is laid upon physical, bodily holiness. It’s not that physical holiness is all that is required in this ancient book; we shall read of holiness in every department of life—social, moral and spiritual. But perhaps as Christians we shall nonetheless notice its particular emphasis on bodily and physical holiness. There are reasons for that, of course.
You may remember that the apostle Paul, when talking to Jews and Christians alike in his Epistle to the Galatians, observes that in the ancient Jewish times God was dealing with his people as a parent deals with a child; whereas in Christian times, now that God’s Son has become incarnate God deals with his people as grown-up sons and daughters (Gal 4:1–7).
That is not to treat the Jewish period as though it were somehow unworthy. None of us would underestimate the importance of childhood training. Certainly, there are lessons that we may not carry beyond childhood, and there are lessons that we learn sufficiently so that we no longer need to be taught them when we arrive at adulthood. There are lessons in adulthood that receive greater emphasis because they are perceived to have much more importance; and so it is between Judaism and Christianity. You will find a different emphasis in Christianity on holiness, an emphasis that bears more upon the spiritual level of our lives. Nonetheless, as I say, we do not underestimate the importance of Israel’s childhood lessons.
God began with them by placing the emphasis on physical and bodily holiness. It is in cleanliness of the body that a child begins to form those concepts that are going to be very useful later on in the pursuit of holiness of spirit. Children can see that their hands get dirty. They can eventually taste the disagreeable taste of filth and easily learn from that the need for physical and bodily cleansing. It is from those concepts of physical stain, physical dirt and physical filth that children can begin to form a concept of the seriousness of spiritual stain, moral filth and spiritual defilement. It was important, therefore, that in those ancient days God should place a tremendous emphasis in Israel upon physical and bodily cleansing. We shall learn lessons from that.
Cleansings for defilement
The other area in which you will notice a difference between Judaism and Christianity is this. Though God set his people high standards of holiness and cleanliness in the Old Testament, he was realistic enough to know that they would not always attain them. The searching, practical question arose therefore: what was to be done when, with all the best will in the world, his people fell short? So there was instituted in Israel an elaborate system of cleansings and washings and purifications by the blood of animals and by water.
We who are Christians will notice at once the vast difference between Israel’s system for cleansing the defiled, and the great cleansing that is offered to us through Jesus Christ our Lord. Again, the differences may be traced in part to this. With Israel, God was beginning to teach them as a father teaches a child. He taught them the need for physical holiness—physical, bodily cleansing—and for that purpose they used water. As Israel progressed under God’s teaching to consider spiritual and moral defilement, even they could begin to see that water, however holy and however plentiful, sprinkled upon one’s body cannot really get down to the root cause of spiritual defilement. As they realized that there was not only a defilement that could defile their bodies, but a more serious defilement that arose from inside the human heart—evil thoughts, impure desires, malevolent actions— the Jews began to see that no quantity of holy water sprinkled on one’s external flesh could possibly suffice to cleanse that fountain of uncleanness. Therefore, they came to understand that, although their ancient system of cleansings was inadequate, it pointed to that deeper and more effective cleansing that the Messiah himself should bring by his own sacrifice and death. As Christians, we shall notice this difference as well.
What is holiness?
The negative side of holiness
But now for a while let us revert to this basic concept of holiness. If one may speak for another, I suppose it is not exactly the most attractive topic to launch in the heat of a Wednesday evening. You might have come with more zest to listen to a harangue about courage or ambition, for many of us feel that holiness is rather a negative thing in life, indicative of something like hospitals and antiseptics. We are more interested in the positive virtues of courage, energy and love. Like schoolboys who are itching to get out to play their games and enjoy life, we haven’t much patience with all the regulations that bid us clean our hands and our hearts. We want to get on with the business of positive living, and holiness seems a bit negative.
I shall have to admit to you that the book of Leviticus, as indeed the New Testament, is full of this negative side of holiness. Leviticus is the inspired protest against all kinds of filth and dirt—physical, moral, spiritual and social. It can be very negative. But then in our more sensible moments I suppose all of us can see that the only attitude you could rightly adopt to any kind of filth is a negative one. At least I hope that, if ever I come to be operated upon in a hospital, when the surgeon is poking around inside me he will take a very negative attitude to every bug he comes across. What would you think if your surgeon saw a bug or two creeping along his surgical glove in the middle of your operation, and said, ‘Oh, a bug! It’s just a little bug; don’t let’s be too negative about these things’? When it comes to your physical health, you’d hope that a surgeon would be as negative as possible over every possible source of infection or uncleanness. Far from these negative ideas being old-fashioned, the more we learn about medical science the more we see the importance of being absolutely negative when it comes to defilements and bugs that can plague our physical health.
Therefore, we mustn’t be surprised to find that a book like Leviticus is full of negative commands. You shall not do this, you shall not do that, you shall not do the other; you shall cleanse this away; you shall purify that until it’s gone; you shall clean this, that and the other thing. Away with dirt, away with filth, away with everything that can defile us physically, morally and spiritually.
I do not know of the prevalent attitudes in modern society here in Southeast Asia. I can tell you with great sorrow of heart that, in many parts of my own country, men and women have given up on this strict attitude towards uncleanness, and we live in an age of permissiveness. While men and women care diligently for their bodies and demand the most careful and scrupulous cleanliness for anything to do with their physical health, when it comes to their moral and spiritual health, permissiveness is running riot. It’s as though we haven’t the sense to see that, if physical uncleanness damages my physical body, moral and spiritual uncleanliness will damage my soul and spirit, and if I leave them unchecked the damage will be irreparable.
May God revive our interest in books like Leviticus and fill us with a sense of the importance of all his negative commands against defilement of every kind.
The positive side of holiness
But we should be doing the concept of holiness a wrong, if we allow ourselves to think that holiness is merely negative. Even in this ancient book of Leviticus, written in the days of Israel’s childhood, holiness as God conceived of it was an exceedingly positive, warm and living thing.
The command, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’, is often thought by Christian people to be a specifically Christian command. It isn’t, of course. It comes from the Old Testament. I took the trouble to read the verse to you this evening so that you should see that it comes from no other book than the book of Leviticus itself (19:18). It lies at the very heart of the concept of holiness that God had for his ancient people. Holiness is the positive driving force of love for my fellow man. To be content with abstinence from dirt and defilement isn’t enough for the holiness of God, which is love that burns unquenchably for the good of his creatures. He bids us to be holy as he is holy, and his standard is that we shall love our neighbour as ourselves. So, in the very context in which that verse is found, you will find the Lawgiver talking to us about the way we treat our neighbours. In business (you shall not cheat them), in social concerns (you shall care for the widows), and so on in all the practicalities of life. The reason and motivation behind those individual commandments is, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’.
But you will see at once that the love of God is a holy love; it is not mere weak sentimentality. Therefore, in the previous verse God says, ‘Rebuke your neighbour frankly so that you will not share in their guilt’ (19:17 NIV). Here very often we lack courage, because really we lack love. We don’t want the other person to lose face. We would expect our medical doctor to tell us if he found that we were sick, but when it comes to our spiritual and moral health we become very squeamish. I know I do. I’m so failing in love that I’m prepared to let my friend get away with substandard behaviour and not rebuke him. God forgive me for my cowardice that I don’t care more than I do. Loving my friend as God loves him would mean pointing out, graciously and kindly, when he sins, that he too may be delivered from this spiritual uncleanness.
Why must we be holy?
As you read Leviticus you may have thought that, when the Israelites had performed all the positive commands and observed all the negative ones, life must have become somewhat of a slavery for them. But that wasn’t how God viewed it.
I suppose when we were little boys and girls we found it a bit of a bind to wash behind our ears, and when people insisted that we take baths and so on. The incessant command, ‘clean your teeth before going to bed’, and all that kind of thing was a bit of a bondage to us. Now that we’ve grown up, I hope we don’t any longer regard cleaning our teeth as a bondage. Rather, we say to ourselves with suitable self-concern, ‘I must clean my teeth, for if my front tooth were to get diseased and fall out what a horrible spectacle it would be’.
No, as God intended it, it was not slavery; it was the very reverse.
God is holy and wants to dwell among us
Hear then God’s concept of holiness as he maps it out for his people. ‘You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy’ (Lev 19:2). ‘You once were slaves, and I have redeemed you; but not only have I redeemed you, I propose to come down and dwell among you’ (cf. Exod 29:46; Lev 26:13; Deut 7:8).
APPLYING THE PRACTICAL LESSONS OF THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LEVITICUS
Consider the staggering grace of God. Why must I be holy? Why must I give up my filthy ways? It’s because I was once a slave, and filthy ways may be suitable for slaves, but I have been redeemed and called to keep company with the divine persons. And if it is true of Israel that God came and walked with them through the desert, pitched his house and tabernacle among them and called them to fellowship with himself, how much truer is it of us who are Christians? Our bodies are the very ‘temple of the Holy Spirit’ (1 Cor 6:19). God himself is pleased to dwell among us by his Spirit. Therefore, we are called to behave in such fashion as may grace the presence of almighty God. This is the lesson that Paul preaches to his converts at Corinth, and you can hear him echoing the ancient sentiment taken from the book of Leviticus.
Just let me explain to you that in ancient Greece their customs were not, perhaps, our customs. In a country like ancient Greece and a city like ancient Corinth, sexual morality was of a very low standard. Even after being converted to Christ, you would have had to tell a Greek that fornication was not a thing that Christians did. Unconverted Greeks would never have questioned it. How then will the Apostle Paul wean the believers away from this behaviour? He says, ‘Consider that your very bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who resides in you in all his divine glory and splendour. And if God dwells with you and walks with you in life, then you are required to develop habits of behaviour that are suitable to the divine resident’ (see 1 Cor 6:12–20).
God wants us to walk as his sons
‘And secondly,’ says God, ‘you once were slaves, but I have broken the bars of your yoke so that you may walk erect’ (see Lev 26:13). God’s concept of holiness is that men and women should be delivered from all that would bow them down and degrade them, and learn to walk upright with full human dignity, facing life as sons and daughters of God, as God originally intended.
Therefore, as I come back to a few particulars, and we don’t have the time to consider more than a few, perhaps you will understand God’s early insistence with Israel on physical and bodily holiness.
THE DEGRADING OF THE BODY
God always starts his lessons at the elementary level, and he delivers his divine protest against all that would dishonour and degrade the human body. He deals with disease and specifies methods of cleansing. Disease defiles and degrades the human body, doesn’t it?
He also deals with pagan customs that would dishonour the human body. In the ancient world there were sundry religions that required men to cut their bodies, mutilate and degrade them, in the worship of their gods. God protested against it. He will not stand by and see pseudo-religion degrading people’s bodies. God made the human body, and though it is ruined and fallen and broken through sin, it is his eventual intention to redeem man’s very body. Therefore, he insisted that it should not be degraded by pagan pseudo-religious rights and ceremonies.
THE DEGRADING OF LOVE
You will also find God’s protest against all perversion of sex, for in the end it degrades human love, does it not? If you want an example, come to our major cities in the West. It doesn’t lead in the end to the exaltation of the human body, and certainly least of all to the exaltation of womanhood; much of it is degraded to the level of the animal. Therefore, God delivers his inspired protest against all permissiveness and perversion of sexual customs and behaviour.
THE DEGRADING OF RELIGION
Holiness too was to penetrate into their business lives. It was a weakness of many an ancient religion that religion wasn’t concerned with morality; it was merely concerned with appeasing the gods. In Greece, for instance, or in Rome, if you wanted to be interested seriously in morality, you would have gone to the philosophers, not to the priests. Religion was a matter of paying your rates and taxes to the gods, and keeping the demons happy so that they wouldn’t send you disease. They’d fight your enemies for you and make your business deals successful. It was not concerned with morality in the normally accepted sense of that term. In the ancient world, Judaism stood like the snow of Mount Everest towering over the heat of the flames, with a divine insistence that true religion should be concerned with true morality. A religion that is not concerned with morality is a pseudo-religion, and in the end a cruel deception of the human spirit.
I shall never forget a friend of mine whom I met when he was already an elderly gentleman. In his earlier days he was a member of a spiritualist church. After his conversion to Christianity, he didn’t deny that the spirits he worshipped were real spirits; they were real enough. But when I asked him what had first led him to Christ, he said, ‘I began to discover that in all my worship of the spirits, I made no moral progress. It was a dead end morally.’ In Christ, in the Sermon on the Mount and in the repetition of the ancient laws of holiness, with their focus on morality, he found the genuine moral progress that his human spirit craved. God’s word says that moral holiness should penetrate the whole of our lives—family, business, school and all else.
God’s provisions for when we fall short of his standards of holiness
Let us turn very briefly to the other side of the story. Israel were to be holy, says Leviticus, ultimately because God had called them to be his people. God had come down to live among them in that ancient tabernacle and temple, so they were to be holy because God dwelt in their midst. But as we know in our own hearts, to have gloriously high standards is one thing; to fulfil them is another. Like us, Israel were a fallen people and they came woefully short of the standards of holiness that God had set for them. What was to be done?
Cleansing by blood
OLD TESTAMENT: THROUGH THE BLOOD OF ANIMALS
A good deal of Leviticus is devoted to telling us what provisions God made to cleanse them. There was cleansing by water, and there was cleansing by blood—the blood of animals slain as victims on the altar. With your modern mind you will perhaps say, ‘But what good did it do to take an animal and kill it? What use was an animal’s blood?’
Well, quite so. Even some of the ancient Jews saw that. When a person had sinned and he brought his animal for sacrifice—perhaps a bullock—and it was killed, clearly the poor old bullock knew nothing about it. The innocent victim had no concept of sin and knew nothing of why the knife should be plunged into its vitals and its life offered. What was God doing in those ancient days by ordering the cleansing of sin by the shedding of blood?
First of all, he was teaching people that sin is a serious matter and cannot be brushed under the carpet and neglected. Before God can forgive, the standard of his holy law must be vindicated. The penalty for the breaking of that law must be paid so that God can forgive the sinner but maintain his law at one and the same time.
Isn’t that problem still with us today? When they have committed a sin, many people speak as though it were enough to say ‘I’m sorry’, and that’s the end of it. But can that be so? Suppose in a moment of carelessness I get drunk and drive my car down your road and run over your child. Do you suppose it’s enough for me to say, ‘Oh, what a pity; I’m sorry I did that. In future, I will make up my mind not to run over any other children.’ Will that satisfy you? When you protest angrily at my foolish carelessness and selfishness that let me get drunk and murder such a potential life, what if I turn round and say, ‘Why all the fuss? It’s done now; you can’t undo it. Let bygones be bygones, and I’ll start afresh.’ That will only add insult to the injury. Am I going to say that the death of a child doesn’t matter? If it doesn’t matter, the child doesn’t matter; and if the child doesn’t matter, in the end you don’t matter and I don’t matter.
True love finds it impossible ever to say that sin doesn’t matter. Because God loves us, he must say that sin matters; and before he can grant us discharge from our guilt, the penalty must be paid. Hence the array of sacrifices in this Old Testament book.
NEW TESTAMENT: THROUGH THE BLOOD OF CHRIST
The New Testament and indeed some of the later prophets in the Old Testament give us to understand that, in addition to this practical lesson that sin costs and without the shedding of blood there can be no forgiveness (Heb 9:22), God was preparing Israel’s mind for the coming of that true sacrifice—the sacrifice of Jesus Christ our Lord, which should avail to put away the guilt of sin.
Israel’s sacrifices were like toy money, as compared to real money. I wonder whether in this part of the world, when you were children you were given toy money to play with. In my day, when parents gave us toys that were of educational value, we were given toy shops. The girls were very good at keeping the things. There were little bottles of imitation sweets, which were bought with toy money. You went along and bought the sweets, and you got back some silver cardboard ‘coins’. We knew it was only pretend money; yet the game was preparing our minds for the day when we should have to handle real money. The real cost of sin was not to be paid by the ‘toy money’ of ancient animal sacrifices. The real cost of sin was paid by the sacrifice of God incarnate. Being human and divine, he understood the hideous debt of sin as no one else could. He faced it, bore its consequence and punishment in his own body at Calvary, so that God’s standard might be maintained righteously in the cleansing of the sinner who repents of the guilt of his sin.
Cleansing by water
Similarly, in ancient Israel’s worship you will find many cleansings by water. Again, it is evident that, whilst water was very good for cleansing the skin, for some defilements literal water wasn’t adequate. So, why use it?
By these outward ceremonies, God was once more preparing the minds of men and women for the necessity of a deeper cleansing that one day should be made available through God’s Holy Spirit poured out by the ascended Christ (Acts 2:33).
Of course, we read in the New Testament that some Israelites became so attached to their outward rites and ceremonies that they stopped there, as though they were completely adequate. The Pharisees in our Lord’s time were punctilious in observing the outward washing of their physical bodies. They ceremonially washed their hands before eating, they wouldn’t eat with defiled Gentiles, and they seemed to be blind to the deeper need of their hearts, morally and spiritually. Our Lord had to point out to them, ‘it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth . . . what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart . . . For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone’ (see Matt 15:10–20).
It would be mockery to offer us a little water sprinkled on our bodies, as though that were enough to cleanse the evil habits of our hearts. Therefore, the New Testament bids us to view these ancient ceremonies as but infant object lessons, parables of that great cleansing that one day the Messiah himself should bring by the dispensing of his Holy Spirit. We who have found redemption from the guilt of sin through the blood of Christ need to remember this other cleansing, which cleanses us not merely from the guilt of our sin but from the defilement of evil habits and uncontrolled urges.
Listen to the Apostle Paul speaking of the Christian equivalent of these ancient Jewish ceremonies of washing. Writing to his fellow missionary, Titus, he says:
For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. (Titus 3:3)
‘What gnarled characters we were, Titus. It wasn’t merely that we had sinned and were guilty; it was that we were twisted personalities, marred in our very makeup. What else could reach us, cleanse us and make us anew?’
But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Saviour appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour. (vv. 4–6)
Thus did the New Testament and salvation in Christ bring us to the full-blown adult reality of holiness that was foreshadowed in the infant lessons that God began to teach his people in the wilderness of Sinai those many centuries ago.
Shall we just ask for God’s help so that we might remember to practise the lessons he has just taught us.
O God, we thank thee for erecting in our world thy challenge and command to holiness of life. As we perceive the ruin and the defilement that sin has spread, we pray, O Lord, that thou will give us the wisdom to listen to thy voice, to learn thy standards and determine to pursue them. And since, O Lord, we come short of them, work in us that repentance, we do beseech thee, that shall acknowledge our need and bring us to Jesus Christ thy Son for cleansing from guilt and cleansing of character that he can offer and that we so sorely need, as we now give thee thanks for thy word in his holy name. Amen.
3. First and Second Kings–Part 1
Let us begin our study this evening by reading in chapter 8 of the first book of Kings.
Now therefore, O God of Israel, let your word be confirmed, which you have spoken to your servant David my father. But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built! Yet have regard to the prayer of your servant and to his plea, O LORD my God, listening to the cry and to the prayer that your servant prays before you this day, that your eyes may be open night and day towards this house, the place of which you have said, ‘My name shall be there’, that you may listen to the prayer that your servant offers towards this place. And listen to the plea of your servant and of your people Israel, when they pray towards this place. And listen in heaven your dwelling place, and when you hear, forgive. If a man sins against his neighbour and is made to take an oath and comes and swears his oath before your altar in this house, then hear in heaven and act and judge your servants, condemning the guilty by bringing his conduct on his own head, and vindicating the righteous by rewarding him according to his righteousness. When your people Israel are defeated before the enemy because they have sinned against you, and if they turn again to you and acknowledge your name and pray and plead with you in this house, then hear in heaven and forgive the sin of your people Israel and bring them again to the land that you gave to their fathers. When heaven is shut up and there is no rain because they have sinned against you, if they pray towards this place and acknowledge your name and turn from their sin, when you afflict them, then hear in heaven and forgive the sin of your servants, your people Israel, when you teach them the good way in which they should walk, and grant rain upon your land, which you have given to your people as an inheritance. If there is famine in the land, if there is pestilence or blight or mildew or locust or caterpillar, if their enemy besieges them in the land at their gates, whatever plague, whatever sickness there is, whatever prayer, whatever plea is made by any man or by all your people Israel, each knowing the affliction of his own heart and stretching out his hands towards this house, then hear in heaven your dwelling place and forgive and act and render to each whose heart you know, according to all his ways (for you, you only, know the hearts of all the children of mankind), that they may fear you all the days that they live in the land that you gave to our fathers. (8:26–40)
May God give us good understanding of his holy word.
Introduction
Tonight we are to begin the study of the first and second books of Kings. In the Hebrew Bible, these two books make up one literary work, but in our English Bible they are divided into first and second books. Therefore, we shall take two nights in the study of them. They are very long and very important books. The books of 1 and 2 Kings belong to the second major division of the Old Testament.
The Old Testament, as you may remember, is in three parts. First of all, there is the Law, the law of Moses, which we find in the first five books of the Old Testament, otherwise known as the Pentateuch. The second division is known as the Prophets, which comprises not merely prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Minor Prophets, but also some books that we normally regard as historical works—Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings are numbered among the Prophets. The third division is called the Writings. Now it is important for our purposes to notice that the first and second books of Kings, though historical books, are regarded by the Hebrew Bible as the work of prophets. That tells us at once that these books are not merely collections of stories or interesting tales; they are not even just collections of important facts. They are all that, but in addition they are inspired interpretations of facts. They have a thesis to develop, a view to put across, lessons to teach, central themes to convey, and we must ask ourselves ‘what is their gospel message?’.
Sometimes, when we read the historical books, we imagine that they are like photograph albums. I don’t know whether you have a family photograph album. Some families have them in the land I come from, and if you turn the pages you’ll find isolated photographs of Aunt Sally here and Uncle George there. Someone might point out to you, ‘Oh, there’s a photograph of Mother posing down by the seaside. Yes, that was just after she got married.’
And as you look at the photograph beside it, you may ask, ‘What’s this one got to do with it?’
‘Oh, that’s a picture of our dog, Fido. It just happened that the family bought a dog at that time.’
There’s not a lot of connection with the photograph of Mother, but it fits on the page, and that’s how it’s got tucked in. There’s no particular rhyme or reason for it; they’re just odd photographs that people took and now they’re in the family album.
Sometimes we look at the historical books of the Old Testament as though they were a collection of stories put together like that, and you make what you like of them. For instance, some preachers take the story of Naaman in 2 Kings 5, and they preach about Naaman; but what on earth the next chapter has got to do with that story, nobody has perhaps discovered.
To begin with, then, let us notice that the historical books are not really like that photograph album. They are the work of prophets: a deliberate collection of stories and facts that are so arranged as to preach a message and give us an inspired interpretation of Old Testament history.
So what subject does the first and second books of Kings deal with, and what is their interpretation of it? Put briefly, the story of 1 and 2 Kings is the story of the government of the holy nation, God’s ancient people, the Jews. It is concerned, therefore, with problems of government.
The first book opens with the death of David and the accession of King Solomon. It begins at the time when Israel’s national affairs were at a high peak of prosperity and success. King David had fought their battles, he had conquered their enemies and brought them to a position of eminence among the nations. Solomon, his son, amassed riches galore and brought his nation fame among the other nations. It was a time when Israel perhaps could have made an effort to become one of the leading empires of the ancient world. That’s how the story begins.
It then tells us of the provision that God devised to maintain his people at that high level of success and prosperity, and if Israel had really used God’s inspired provision, they would have remained at that level of enjoyment, success and spiritual wellbeing. But alas, as the story points out, Israel frequently forgot and neglected, and sometimes abused and perverted, the provision that God had made for them. By and large therefore, they departed from God and fell into all sorts of grievous mistakes.
Soon after Solomon’s death, the nation tragically broke into two halves—the two tribes of Judah in the south, and the ten tribes of Israel in the north—and never again were they joined in the subsequent centuries (see 1 Kgs 12). The Assyrians conquered the ten tribes of Israel in the eighth century BC, took them away into captivity and peopled the land of Israel with foreigners (see 2 Kgs 17). To complete the sad story, up came Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Babylonians, and conquered the two remaining tribes of Judah in the sixth century BC. He smashed their city, Jerusalem, and their temple, and took them down to Babylon (2 Kgs 24:10–17).
So the second book of Kings ends on a very sorry note. It tells us how Israel and Judah, who together could have been the shining and leading empire in the ancient world, were degenerated by their folly, conquered by their enemies and ended ignominiously in exile.
So it is a gloomy book; but there’s another side to the story. From time to time there were powerful, energetic revivals among the Judahites, accompanied by a return to God in great joy and gladness, and the historian points out the secret of these revivals. Whenever the people turned back to God in repentance and accepted the provision he had made, invariably it led to nationwide revival. As we read these ancient stories therefore, we shall be learning a lesson for ourselves. We shall be saying, ‘If God made the ancient people a provision and they prospered when they used it, and failed and suffered when they neglected it, let us take the warning and advice. Let us see to it that we adhere to the provision God has made for us so that we may prosper and that we do not neglect God’s provision, lest we in our turn fail and incur needless suffering.’
What is the gospel message according to 1 & 2 Kings?
God’s provision for governing and maintaining his people
I have said that God made provision for governing Israel and Judah and to maintain their spiritual health and prosperity. First of all, then, what was the provision that God made for his ancient people? The answer to that is that he built them a house—a house called the house of the LORD. I ask you to notice that.
God’s answer to the problem of how to maintain the holy nation in vigorous prosperity and health was not to raise up a succession of brilliant men. King David had been a very brilliant man, of course. He had fought all their battles, right from those early days when he went out to meet Goliath. He defeated the old giant and brought his head in his hand. All the girls and all the fellows had written their pop songs about David, the conqueror of Goliath. They had all fallen in love with him, and their songs went right to the top of the charts.
David had also written many of their psalms, and when Israel sang the praises of God, more often than not it was in the words that David had written. He had founded their capital city and brought the nation together, joining the two tribes and the ten tribes. For the last forty years, it had been David this and David that and David the other—David all the time! He was their great hero, and apart from that one unfortunate rebellion led by Absalom his son, David had done everything, and they couldn’t dream of a world in which there wasn’t a David.
As he grew elderly, they scratched their heads and said, ‘Whatever shall we do when David is gone?’ When he got very old, they covered him with clothes but he could not get warm (1 Kgs 1:1). They said, ‘This is terrible; what can we do to keep him alive, because if David goes, what shall we do?’ They tried all sorts of curious methods to keep him alive, but it was useless. He got colder and colder, and in the end David died. A gloom settled on the nation. What should they do now that the brilliant David had gone?
Was God’s answer to raise up a whole string of brilliant men? No, it wasn’t. I know that as Solomon began life he was brilliant and very wise, but in his old age he turned foolish and ended under a cloud of folly. Many of the kings who followed were very ordinary men. Just a few of them were brilliant; some were able men, and some were dithering idiots. By and large, they were so ordinary that you could scarcely remember their names unless you’d been to a Bible school or something.
Perhaps you’re saying, ‘Well, now, that’s a funny thing. If God could raise up one man like David, why didn’t he raise up a whole succession of brilliant men and keep everything going?’
Well, he didn’t. And you could ask the same question about Christianity, couldn’t you? Remember how it started off after the ascension of Christ with brilliant spiritual giants. There was Peter himself, who preached and three thousand were converted through one sermon. There was the great Apostle Paul, going out and preaching the gospel with myriads of people getting converted and churches established. Brilliant men who have changed the face of the world two or three times over. But then, as everybody who has read church history knows, after the apostolic age God didn’t continue raising up brilliant men. Yes, there were some; but for the most part the men who followed were pretty ordinary—such as we are, for instance. Oh, excuse me if that offends you—such as I am myself!
And you say, ‘If God can raise up a man like Paul, why doesn’t he raise up a whole succession of men like Paul, and we should have one constant revival?’
But then we should never need revival, for things would always continue at the tremendously high-level peak of spirituality and prosperity. That’s how we think, but it’s not how God thinks.
So, very early on in the reign of Solomon he brought it home to Solomon himself, and thus to the nation, what God’s idea was for keeping that nation at its high level of spiritual prosperity. His provision was the building of the house of the LORD at Jerusalem. I have read to you part of Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of that house (1 Kgs 8), and if you were attending as we read, you will have discovered that Solomon saw in that house of the Lord the cure for all ills and the solution to every problem that could possibly arise in all the long course of Jewish history. Notice the constant repetition of the term:
‘O Lord,’ he said, ‘what a marvellous thing it is that you have come to reside in this house. Now, put it into the minds of your people to remember this house. Whatever their need, teach them to look towards this house. If perhaps they have sinned and you’ve driven them into exile, then cause them to repent and turn and pray towards this house. And when they pray towards this house, then bring them back again. If they have sinned and there is a shortage of rain or a blight on their crops, O God, put it into their minds to look back towards this house and pray towards this house, and that will mean their recovery. If it’s not the nation, but some personal need in their hearts—for everybody has their own private difficulties and knows the plague of their own heart—remind them that they only need to look towards this house and they will find provision to meet their needs and to restore them to spiritual health and prosperity.’
So, clearly, God’s provision for maintaining his people was the building of the house of the Lord at Jerusalem.
The house of the Lord
Our next task is to examine what exactly we mean when we talk about the house of the Lord. That’s interesting for us as Christians, isn’t it? Solomon built God a house, but if you remember, the New Testament talks about us in similar terms. Peter says that all believers are like living stones being built up as a spiritual house (see 1 Pet 2:5). So, when we hear the Old Testament talking about the house of the Lord, we listen with our ears pricked up because we know there is something like that in Christianity, and we are living stones in the house of the Lord.
And then Paul says, ‘I have written these things to you, Timothy, so that you might know how people ought to behave in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth’ (see 1 Tim 3:14–15). So, once again we are told that as Christians, as believers in the Lord Jesus, we are being built up as a spiritual house for the Lord.
There are various terms used in Scripture to describe Christians. As sheep in the flock of Christ, we think of ourselves as people who are liable to wander (Isa 53:6), not very clear in our heads and all that kind of thing. And we think of Christ as the great Shepherd who feeds and tends and leads us (Heb 13:20). Or as the bride of the Lamb, we are thinking of the love of Christ towards us and his desire to remove our spots and blemishes and make our spiritual faces shine (Rev 19:7; Eph 5:25–27). Or as a temple, we are thinking of our worship and service of God (Eph 2:21–22). So, when Scripture calls us the house of the Lord—‘a dwelling place for God by the Spirit’—what are we to think of? Let’s do a bit of research on the matter.
Jacob’s vision
Perhaps the easiest way to get the idea into our heads is to recur to one very early example of the house of the Lord. I refer to the book of Genesis and the experience of Jacob (Gen 28:10–17). You will know the story very well. Jacob had just cheated his brother in a rather alarming fashion, and so bitter was the hatred between the two boys that Jacob was leaving home to go into a far country to find himself a job. He travelled all that day, and when the sun went down he got a stone for his pillow and lay down. At last, he could scheme no more, his business scheming had tired him out and he went to sleep. As Jacob slept, he had a vision, and he saw a ladder set up on earth, the top of it reached to heaven, and he saw the Lord standing—notice, please, where God stood—not at the top of the ladder but at the side of the ladder. And Jacob saw the angels of God ascending and descending—going up from the divine presence and coming down to the divine presence. Oh, it was a wonderful vision, the likes of which had never entered his head before. And when he woke up, he said as follows:
‘Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.’ And he was afraid and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’ (Gen 28:16–17)
Let’s think about what those terms mean. ‘Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.’ Ah, yes, he might have behaved a little bit differently had he known it, mightn’t he? Jacob believed in God. Of course he did. But he believed in a God who was away off in his heaven out there beyond the bright blue sky; a God you prayed to if you felt so inclined on odd occasions. And when Jacob had been doing his twisty deals with Esau, he felt it was convenient to have God a long way off. Now he woke up to the fact that while God may be in his heaven, he isn’t necessarily a long way off. ‘Surely the LORD is in this place,’ says Jacob, ‘—right by my pillow, by my side, by my very elbow. This is none other than the house of God.’ That’s what you mean by the house of God—it’s a place that localizes the very presence of God.
Then Jacob says, ‘and this is the gate of heaven’. Now, when we hear that phrase, I suspect we immediately think of the gate as being the way into heaven. But that wasn’t exactly how Jacob was thinking. He wasn’t intending to go to heaven—not just yet anyway; he had a lot more business to do, and he was for staying around a bit longer.
When Jacob said, ‘this is the gate of heaven’, he was thinking by analogy of the gate in any eastern city. The gate of a city in the East was the place where the business of the city was done, where the elders of the city met to govern—pass its laws, administer its affairs and control the business. The gate was the headquarters of the government of that city. You can see how Jacob is looking at things. He said, ‘I now have discovered that God is in this place: this is the house of God’.
And then he asks himself, ‘What is God doing in this place?’.
Well, can’t you see, Jacob? What do you think all these ascending and descending angels are for? You are being given an insight now into the civil service of heaven. These are God’s executives. They move out from his presence to do his will, to control his universe; and when their mission is accomplished they return reverently and stand in the presence of God, awaiting their next assignment.
What a marvellous vision Jacob had in his sleep that night. He was something of a schemer and administrator himself, but he’d never seen a form of government like this—a government centred upon God. Here was God by the side of the ladder, right by his elbow, in command of the universe’s most efficient civil service, with the angels of God ascending and descending. That’s what you mean when you talk about the house of God. It’s God in his government; God at the centre of the divine administration; God not a long way off in his heaven letting earth go as it will, but God in ‘this place’.
Jacob saw his opportunity that day. He saw a gospel message in that vision, didn’t he? He said to himself, ‘As I lie here thinking about my plans, and how I am going to get a job and make ends meet, if it’s really true that God is right beside me in this place with all the resources of the universe and the angelic civil service at his command, why don’t I commit my life to him and ask him to rule and administer my affairs?’.
In the kind of language that Jacob knew, he made a vow. ‘God,’ he said, ‘if this is for real, and you will guide me in the way that I should go, and give me bread to eat and clothes to wear; if you will look after my affairs and govern them, then you will be my God and this shall be your house’ (see Gen 28:20–22).
God’s purpose in having the house of the Lord built
So, when we come to the first book of Kings and we read of Solomon building God a house, we do well to import these same ideas. God had that house built in Jerusalem so that he himself might descend and dwell among his people, and govern them there by his immediate presence. Now perhaps you will perceive something from what I said earlier. Why didn’t God propose to bless Israel by raising up a succession of brilliant men? It was because he had a better provision—not a succession of brilliant men, but the presence of almighty God dwelling among them. Men come and men go, but God was to be among them, abiding with them.
Use your imagination for a moment as to what a provision this was. Here was this small state of Judah and Israel, way out in that ancient East. It taxed even Solomon’s ability to believe if God would really do it: ‘Will the infinite almighty God come down and dwell in a house that I have built in Jerusalem City, so that we may take our problems to God, and he will help us to solve them? [see 1 Kgs 8:27f] May we turn to God whenever we need him and ask for his wisdom and his guidance so that he will be among us and fight our battles and preserve us? If that is true, what a fantastic thing it is.’
God’s house today is of living stones
Let us turn aside for a moment from that ancient picture, for God has made the same provision for us, and even better. When they built God a house in ancient Israel it had to be built of ordinary stones, and the people were distinct from the building. They could come as far as the building, but they were different from the building: they were something separate. The house that God has nowadays—the place where he dwells—is not some building like Jalan Imbi Chapel.3 It isn’t even some glorious Gothic cathedral stationed somewhere in Europe. The house that God has now is a house made up of people—living stones, and God himself dwells among them.
Let’s pause and enjoy it for a moment; just try and take it in. We sit here before God, believers in Jesus Christ our Lord, and we form God’s house. That must mean that God is in this place; the almighty and all-sufficient God is dwelling here among us. Oh, my brothers and sisters, get hold of it. As a member of the house of God, see what your unspeakable privilege is.
As you are toiling in your office tomorrow doing the work of the Lord, write it across your desk, if you will: Surely the Lord is in this place. As you try to grapple with the difficulties of modern business—the pressures that arise, the problems that vex you and the temptations that assail you until you scarcely know what to do, and perhaps dread the phone ringing again—remember that God is in this place. He is at your very elbow, by the telephone, and you have only to raise your heart in prayer to him and he is by your side to strengthen you, to empower your thinking, to increase your insight, to strengthen your moral courage and nerve, and to help you serve him as you should.
Christian mother, as you are bringing up the children in your family under the pressures of modern society, wondering about their careers, how to keep peace in the home and how to guide them, write it across your memory: Surely the Lord is in this place. You school fellows and girls sitting for your exams, and perhaps the day before you are worried a little bit about how things will go. You’re doing your studies for the Lord, aren’t you? It’s not like the worldly students who are merely seeking their own ambitions; you are doing your studies and sitting these exams because you believe that this is God’s will for you. When the day of the test comes, write it across the top of your desk if you like: Surely the Lord is in this place, and remind yourself that you may write every examination answer as you’ve done many times before. Just whisper your prayer to the Lord, ‘Now Lord, help me. Thank you for being at my very elbow and thank you for being in my heart.’
So, the great gospel message of the first and second books of Kings is the provision that God made for the governing and maintenance of his people.
Lessons from the details of the house
We are told that this house had all sorts of arrangements and furniture and rituals connected with it. We are going to look at some of these details because in them we shall find lessons of the spiritual provision that God made for his people. So let us glance briefly at what those provisions are. You will find them listed in 1 Kings 6 and 7.
| 6:1–10: | Structural arrangements—what shape it was to be. |
| 6:14–38: | Internal installations and decorations. |
| 7:1–12: | Solomon’s palace that he built alongside it. |
| 7:13–51: | Furniture for the court. |
Perhaps that all sounds a little bit difficult and very detailed, but it’s very practical. One of these days you may be in the position where you’re building yourself a house. If you’re going to build it from scratch, the first thing you’ll have to decide is the structure. Is it going to be a bungalow or a two-storey affair? Then, what shape is it going to have? Is it going to be L-shaped, oblong, square, or round? When you’ve decided the structure of the house, you will probably discuss it with your family. ‘What do you think we ought to do for the inside? Shall it be three bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, one dining room and a kitchen? Or shall we have two bedrooms, one dining room, one lounge and a library? Shall we have air-conditioning?’ And so on and so forth. You will then decide the internal installations and decorations. Finally, when you’ve got all that decided, you’ll say, ‘How shall we arrange the garden? Shall we have trees, or shall we have a swimming pool? What shall we have outside the house? Shall we have grass or a rockery, or what shall we have?’
In this ancient book, God describes for us the building of his house, and he deals first with the structure, then with the internal installations and decorations, and finally with the furniture that was to be put in the court. So we’re now going to study those in detail and see what provision they made for Israel.
The structure of the house of the Lord
Just let’s take the first one: the structure of the house of the Lord. That will do for tonight. It will get us started on the detailed study and will also emphasize in our minds the message that we have already learned.
Notice that there was to be merely one house, but in addition there were a large number of side rooms, so I’ll tell you what they were for. The priests and the Levites had all sorts of jobs to do for God. Some priests had to look after the incense and pound it until it was ready to be burned, so they needed a little room for that. Another lot of priests had the job of making the cakes that eventually were to go on the table as showbread, and they needed a place to do that. There were other fellows, whose job was to collect the wood that was needed for the sacrifices on the altar outside in the court, and they needed somewhere to store the wood. Others were in charge of the trumpets that were to be blown at the feast days, and they needed a nice place to polish them up to make them as they should be for their particular job. There were all sorts of little side rooms so that the service of the house of the Lord might go on.
But now I would ask you to observe how those side rooms were related to the one main house. First, I’ll tell you how they were not related. They weren’t set out in a whole wing going off the main house, room after room after room after room, with each room getting further and further and further away from the house. It was not like that at all. They were so built that every little room was attached immediately and directly to the house itself. Every single room, of course, had four walls, and one of those walls was the wall of the house of the Lord. That’s how they were built—all equally nestled around the side walls of the house.
Now come with me into one of these rooms. There’s Hezekiah or Habakkuk or some other priest, and he’s pounding the incense, doing the work of the Lord. You’ll see him stop for a moment and look over to the inside wall, and he’ll offer a prayer. Why is that? That wall is the wall of the house, and in his little room where he’s doing his job for God he is in direct contact with it. There’s nothing between him and the house, apart from the wall of the house itself. The man in the storey below is getting the trumpets ready, and he too is in direct contact with the house of the Lord. They didn’t have to go through somebody else’s room, for each one was always and constantly in direct contact with the house.
You say, ‘That’s a very small thing, isn’t it?’
No, it isn’t. We shall see later on tomorrow night how important it became in history. But it’s important, even now, for us to grasp it. We are the house of God; every true believer is a living stone in that house. There is only one house of God; you will never read in holy Scripture of the ‘houses’ of God. That one house is composed of every believer from Pentecost to the Lord’s coming. All of us can’t be in the same place at any one time, can we? Here are you in Kuala Lumpur, and there am I in Belfast most of my days, and there are some other folks down in Australia, some in Africa, some in America and some at the North Pole. How are we all related to this house of the Lord? Well, every single one of us is in direct contact with it. So in KL you are in direct contact with the Lord—the Lord is in this place; and we in Belfast are in direct contact with the Lord; as they are at the North Pole and elsewhere. What a mercy that is. Just fancy what a bind and difficulty it would be, if here in KL you wanted to know what the mind of the Lord was over a problem, and you had to send all the way to Belfast to find out through us.
‘Well,’ you say, ‘Mr Preacher, don’t be so silly, we should never think of consulting Belfast.’
Thank God for that! You would go direct to the Lord, wouldn’t you? Carry on doing it. You won’t mind my saying, will you, that we in Belfast wouldn’t think of coming through KL, because we can come direct to the Lord too?
And if you have a problem at your work, sitting at your desk you have direct contact with the Lord. In the home or in school, you have direct contact with the Lord, for surely the Lord is in this place. Wherever you are, whatever your job, at your work for God—be it in church, in the factory, on the farm—if you are a believer you are in direct contact with the blessed Lord himself. He’s always there at your very elbow to strengthen you in your work, to guide you in your problems, to give insight, powers of thought and powers of love and powers of strength, and to maintain you by his divine presence. Oh, what a gospel it is! May God so put it into our hearts ever to remember it. It is the cure for all our troubles, as Solomon saw so long ago.
So as we conclude this part of our study, suppose any one of us here tonight is feeling down spiritually. Perhaps the day has been difficult somehow, or life in these past weeks has been full of problems, such that you felt yourself getting further from the Lord. Maybe you’ve got into all sorts of tangles and you don’t know what the answers are. If so, listen to Solomon’s prayer: ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘each one of us has got a plague in our heart, but put it in our memories that wherever we get to, however difficult our circumstances, if we only look towards this house and to the living God who abides there, we shall find restoration and blessing and recovery and maintenance.’
And so it will be with us this very night. Wherever you are, my brother or my sister, may God put it into your heart to look towards the living God at your very elbow, at your very side. God is in this place, there to maintain you, to recover you and to bless you with his infinite blessing.
May the Lord bless our hearts and lead us to think about these things. And tomorrow, if it is his will, we shall continue and complete the study of the house of the Lord.
Shall we pray.
O Lord, we thank thee for thy marvellous condescension. Wilt thou indeed, the God of heaven, come and dwell here on earth in our humble hearts in these small temples of the Holy Spirit. O God, then we praise thee gratefully and from full hearts. Forgive us for the times when we have forgotten thee and relied upon our own unaided wisdom. Tonight, O Lord, bring us back to realize afresh what it means that thou art with us, by our very side and in this place; and grant us, Lord, consciousness to depend upon thee and to obey thy directions, that thy will may be done and thy kingdom extended in our hearts. We ask it through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
4. First and Second Kings—Part 2
Summary of our study so far
Please turn to 1 Kings 6, ready in a moment to continue our study of these two historical books, 1 and 2 Kings. Just let me remind you briefly of what we found yesterday evening.
We found that the books of Kings deal with the provision that God made for the maintenance of his people after the death of King David—at that high peak of spiritual blessing and prosperity they had reached. It turned out to be the building of the house of the Lord at Jerusalem, where God himself deigned to come and dwell so that he should be there among his people all the time and in every circumstance, to guide them, bless them and to be the answer to their difficulties.
We drew the parallel of the holy nation with our own Christian experience, in that God’s provision for us is still the same nowadays, for he has constituted those who trust Christ ‘the house of God’. And we saw that it is a superior house to that ancient one built at Jerusalem, for it was built of ordinary stones, and the people of God in general had to abide outside it. Whereas the house of God today is built of living stones, and the people of God are those living stones that constitute the house of God. Similarly, in ancient times, the ordinary Israelite did not have immediate access into that house, but nowadays every believer has access to the very presence of God by dint of the fact that they form the house themselves.
Then we started to study the detailed provision God had made for the house, and we considered its structure. We found that there was to be only one house; but while there was one house, there were many side chambers where the various servants of God did their different kinds of work. All the side chambers had equal and immediate contact with that house, so whichever servant it was, in whatever side chamber, in whatever task he was doing, every servant had equal and immediate contact with the one house of the Lord.
Again, we drew a parallel with ourselves today as believers. For the sake of the work of the Lord we are scattered hither and thither on the face of the earth, as individuals, small groups and separate assemblies. But wherever we may be, each one of us as individuals and each individual church has immediate contact with the living Lord himself and direct access to him who dwells among his people. We do not form a physical house tied to one geographical spot; we form a spiritual house—one house throughout all the generations since Pentecost until the Lord’s coming. Some of the living stones are already in heaven, multitudes of them are still on earth, yet it is one house, and every believer and every individual church is immediately in contact with that one living Lord dwelling in that one house.
Lessons from the details of the house of the Lord (2)
The internal installations and decorations
Now let’s move on. We’ll read from 1 Kings 6 and we will only have time to consider some of the more outstanding details of the house.
So Solomon built the house and finished it. He lined the walls of the house on the inside with boards of cedar. From the floor of the house to the walls of the ceiling, he covered them on the inside with wood, and he covered the floor of the house with boards of cypress. He built twenty cubits of the rear of the house with boards of cedar from the floor to the walls, and he built this within as an [oracle], as the Most Holy Place. The house, that is, the nave in front of the inner sanctuary [the oracle KJV], was forty cubits long. The cedar within the house was carved in the form of gourds and open flowers. All was cedar; no stone was seen. The [oracle] he prepared in the innermost part of the house, to set there the ark of the covenant of the LORD. (6:14–19)
And he overlaid the whole house with gold, until all the house was finished. Also the whole altar that belonged to the [oracle] he overlaid with gold. In the [oracle] he made two cherubim of olive wood, each ten cubits high. (6:22–23)
And he overlaid the cherubim with gold. Round all the walls of the house he carved engraved figures of cherubim and palm trees and open flowers, in the inner and outer rooms. (6:28–29)
The oracle and the ark of the covenant
So now, for a moment, we turn from the structure of the house to the internal installations and decorations. The inside of the house was divided into two parts, the more important part called the oracle being at the rear of the house. It was built so that they might put the ark of the covenant of the Lord there (1 Kgs 6:19 KJV).
It was called ‘the oracle’ because it was where men might come and hear the voice of the living God speaking to them. It was the place, then, for the ark of the covenant, and that holy covenant was based upon the law of Moses, written on tablets of stone. Let me recite the first of those commandments: ‘You shall have no other gods before me’ (Exod 20:3). He was to be their Lord, their absolute sovereign; they were to have no other lord but God.
The terms and conditions upon which God as Israel’s king should govern his people were enshrined in the ark of the covenant. But in addition to the laws of that covenant, there was the place at this throne where, according to the ancient promise given in the book of Exodus, God would meet and commune with his people (Exod 25:22). Israel’s priests could come there and hear the very voice of the living God speaking and making known his will. Here was no dumb idol with no voice; no deaf idol that couldn’t hear the cries of his people; but a living God who could speak and make his presence known.
The altar of incense
Then just outside the oracle, but belonging to it, was the golden altar of incense (6:22). This was the altar of prayer. From time to time the priest would come to this altar to burn the incense before God. As he burned it, he would pray towards the divine presence situated on the ark, the throne of God’s glory. It was a two-way conversation. There was a living God dwelling in that oracle, who spoke to his people; and there was an altar of incense where his people might come and speak to him.
What a glorious privilege God gave to Israel! Just imagine the God of heaven, the creator of the universe and its moral governor, coming down and dwelling in your midst. Imagine being allowed to come and stand before his presence, to talk to his divine Majesty and ask him to do things for you. And just imagine the superb grace of that almighty divine King being prepared to bend his ear and say, ‘Hello, Elijah, is that you? What do you want me to do? Very good; I will do it.’ A God who would listen to his people’s prayers and willing to speak to them, to comfort their hearts and give them the guidance that they needed—that was the kind of provision God made in that ancient house for the governing of his people.
The cherubim
Then notice one other thing; and you who are experts in the Mosaic tabernacle will notice it in particular. For if you would understand the house of the Lord as presented in the book of Kings, you must not suppose it is merely a repetition of the tabernacle. It presupposes all that the tabernacle was designed to teach, but it is a somewhat different thing. It is an instrument of government, and therefore the description of the house of the Lord concentrates on the things that were different from the tabernacle.
In the oracle of the house of the Lord then, there was the ark, with the cherubim above the mercy seat as the tabernacle of Moses had. It was, in fact, the same ark. But in the house of the Lord there were two other cherubim (1 Kgs 6:23–28). They were colossal cherubim—with their wings outstretched they spanned the whole breadth of the house. They were standing there before the throne of God, as though they were ready to fly to do his bidding and see that his commands were carried out. Symbolically, these cherubim were the executive powers of the government.
You’ll know that some governments in the world have passed all sorts of laws, and then they haven’t had the means of getting them carried out. But the divine government not only made laws and issued commands; it had executive powers available to see that they were carried out. In those early days, of course, the full purposes of God were not yet revealed, and God himself had to be content with things and institutions that were more symbols of coming events than representations of present reality.
A LOOK AT THE SYMBOLS
For a moment, let us patiently observe the symbols in that house of the Lord. There was the throne of God, ready to issue the commands based on the covenant, and there were the great cherubim.
You say, ‘What are cherubim?’ When I get home to heaven shall I see things flying about, each with four wings and four heads?’ (cf. Ezek 1:6).
No, I don’t think you’ll find anything so grotesque. Cherubim are not a kind of angel; they are symbols.
‘Symbols of what?’, you say.
They are symbols of life in all its varied kinds. Their faces looked like this: each of the four had the face of a human being, and on the right side each had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of an ox; each also had the face of an eagle (Ezek 1:10).
Do you know how God gets his commands done in the physical world? Suppose he wants to grow apples; how does God get a tree to grow apples? Have you ever pondered it? Do you suppose he says, ‘Let’s send down a government white paper, and say, “Tree: grow some apples”’? No, he doesn’t do it quite that way round. If God wants a tree to grow apples, he gives the tree apple tree life, and because it’s got apple tree life it sprouts apples.
Men and women have been a little bit more difficult because they have sinned against God. In those days, God’s redemption of humankind was not yet complete and he had to be content with symbols that prophesied what it should be.
So, let’s look at the symbols. Here were the two cherubim, symbols of life of every conceivable kind, and when they looked out from the divine presence all around the walls of the house, what do you think they saw? Well, hosts of other cherubim carved on the walls of the house all the way round, and palm trees and open flowers (see 1 Kgs 6:29). It must have been a beautiful thing to go inside that house. And once you were inside, you’d be overwhelmed by the impression that you were in the presence of life—teeming and vigorous life—beautiful palm trees, open flowers and cherubim. Yes, that was the secret of God’s government. As the executive cherubim in his presence looked out to see that his commands were done, their gaze was met by life all around the walls that answered to their life.
We live in a day when God at last has arrived not merely at symbols but at the reality. God made man upon this earth and gave him physical life, but man fell and rebelled against God. God then redeemed his people, Israel, and put them under the old covenant. But that didn’t work too well. The law was very good but Israel didn’t have the strength to carry it out. The law was weak because of the flesh—men and women hadn’t got the puff and the ability to carry out those exalted commandments of the Lord (see Rom 8:3). So, what has God done? How in this age does he get his people to do his will?
Oh, the secret has been out long since. He doesn’t just give us the law of Moses, and say, ‘Do that’; he gives us his own divine life by putting his Holy Spirit within us, giving us the very life of God, so that we find his commandments are not grievous (1 John 5:3). Why are they not grievous? It’s because, as the Holy Spirit expounds the divinely inspired word in our ears, he bears witness in our hearts to that word and gives us the power to do the commandment that he himself has given. This is the glorious secret of being a Christian. We have the power to do God’s will through the divine nature and the divine life that we received from the blessed Lord Jesus when we trusted him.
The furnishings in the court
So much then for a few of the details of the internal installations and decorations. We will move on to 1 Kings 7 and we must pass over the first paragraph, which deals with the house of the king. Interesting and important as that is, we don’t have the time to consider it.
So let’s come to the final division of the plans: the arrangements and the furniture for the court of the house of the Lord. Here again, you will notice two major differences from the Jewish tabernacle.
The two pillars
The first is that Solomon fashioned two bronze pillars (7:15). They were mighty great pillars, freestanding and ornamental, and on the top of each of them there was a beautiful molten capital. All round the capitals there were rows of pomegranates and lilies. Oh, they were superbly beautiful—they were meant to be, of course, standing right in front of the porch so that when anybody came to the house of the Lord, they would be greeted outside by these two delightful capitals, with lilies—those beautiful flowers, and pomegranates—that fruit so full of seed.
The task of the two pillars was to hold up those delightful capitals to the gaze of everyone who came towards the house of the Lord. They were for more than decorative purposes, of course, but they carried spiritual significance. Inscribed on each pillar was a name: on one pillar was the name Jachin (yāḵîn in Hebrew), meaning ‘God will establish it’, and on the other was the name Boaz (bō’az in Hebrew), meaning ‘in it is strength’.
It is a very interesting fact that there were two pillars in the court of the house of the Lord, because when we come to the New Testament we shall find that the modern house of the Lord has a pillar or two around it.
These things write I unto thee, hoping to come unto thee shortly; but if I tarry long, that thou mayest know how men ought to behave themselves in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth. (1 Tim 3:14–15 RV)
Here we have a solid, plain, straightforward New Testament verse that tells us that the present house of the Lord has this precise thing as one of its spiritual functions: it is to act as the pillar and ground of the truth.
Now, please notice what the verse says and what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say that the church is the truth. That is a gross mistake that some people have made. The church isn’t the truth; but the church does have the task of holding up that truth, just like those two pillars had the task of holding up the delightfully beautified capitals. It is still our task as members of the house of God to be pillars—base and column firmly planted, standing full square, immovable, rooted and grounded—so that we might hold up God’s beautiful and attractive truth before the gaze of the world.
I hope you agree with me that God’s truth is beautiful and attractive. The gospel of the glory of our blessed God is nothing to be ashamed of (see 2 Tim 1:8). Paul says, ‘I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God for salvation’ (see Rom 1:16). What a delightful, beautiful and fruitful thing the sacred gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord is. Our job is to stand firm as pillars and hold up that truth before the eyes of men and women. There isn’t anything else that can save them; there’s salvation in nothing else (see Acts 4:12). What a privilege it is to hold it up before the eyes of the world!
I whisper in your ears that sometimes Christian pillars get a bit wobbly, but then you know it can happen, don’t you? At one stage, Paul went up to Jerusalem because some of the early Christians were getting a little bit wobbly as to what the gospel really was. The question was, do you have to be circumcised and keep the law of Moses to be saved? Was it simply by faith through grace, or do you have to add the works of the law to merit salvation? Paul said, ‘You know, I went up to Jerusalem, and I met Peter, James and John, who were reputed to be pillars.
So I just pushed them a little bit here and a little bit there to see whether they would stand firm, or whether they were a bit wobbly as well. Thank God, I found that those three “pillars” stood firm in the truth of the gospel—we are justified by grace through faith without the works of the law’ (see Gal 2).
That is our job too. Oh, may God save us from becoming wobbly in the question of God’s truth. God forbid that we should ever be ashamed of it. Let’s hold it up. Not for nothing did those ancient pillars have lilies carved on them, for it is God’s truth that can beautify our lives. Not for nothing did they have pomegranates on them, with their countless seeds, for it is God’s truth that can make us fruitful in every good work (see Col 1:10). Our job is to hold up God’s objective truth.
The lavers
In 1 Kings 7:23 we read of the second difference between the house of the Lord and the tabernacle: ‘[Solomon] made the sea of cast metal’. While it was called a sea, it was actually a tremendously large basin filled with water. It was so big they called it a sea, and placed it on the backs of twelve molten oxen. I fancy that the water came in through pipes into the bellies of the oxen and out through their mouths, drawn off by taps or spigots. Be that as it may, it was a tremendous affair. Moses’ tabernacle did have a laver with water in it, but never, never such a thing as this mighty great bowl set on the backs of the oxen.
And then, not content with that, we read that Solomon had ten subsidiary lavers constructed (v. 38). These were smaller bowls on a framework that had wheels, so that they could be wheeled around the court wherever water was needed for cleansing (see vv. 27–37).
Interestingly enough, in this particular passage you will not read about the other vessel that you might have expected, namely the altar of sacrifice. They did have one, of course, but as far as the book of 1 Kings is concerned, it places the emphasis not on the altar and its shedding of blood for the forgiveness of sins, but rather on the laver and the ten subsidiary lavers. Why is that, do you suppose? Well, perhaps the quickest way to understand it is to come to the spiritual reality of our own day. The laver in Israel was full of water to cleanse people, but of course it would only cleanse their skin. Nowadays it is Christ who cleanses us, and he does it, not by sprinkling tap water on us, however holy, but by his Holy Spirit.
Let me read you some verses that are relevant to this part of our study. Paul is writing to his fellow missionary, Titus, about the Christians in Crete. Now, in those early days, the Cretans were a very difficult race. I must bear testimony to them that modern Christians in Crete are delightful people. Don’t go off with the impression that they’re the same as the ancient Cretans, who, between you and me, were a difficult crowd. Chapter 1 says, ‘One of the Cretans, a prophet4 of their own, said, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons”’ (v. 12). And Paul adds, ‘This testimony is true’ (v. 13). You know, they’d promise you the moon one day, but they wouldn’t fulfil it. They’d promise you to be at the prayer meeting, but they wouldn’t turn up. They’d promise to take a Sunday school class, but then they were too lazy to leave their dinner and come and take it. They were difficult folks, and though some of them got converted, some of their national characteristics clung to them a little bit, which meant that it was a trifle difficult in the church in Crete.
So Paul had to write to Titus to give him some advice on what to do. He tells him not to be too hard on them, ‘For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another’ (3:3).
What had made the change in them? Well, now notice that he doesn’t mention the blood of Christ here, which is necessary to obtain forgiveness of sin, of course. But Paul is thinking of something more than forgiveness. He is thinking of a power that can not only forgive but can change a person’s character and turn a lazy man into an energetic man; turn a liar into a truthful man; and turn a glutton into a man of self-discipline and service to others. What power can turn an ungovernable rebel into a saint of God? Paul gives us the answer:
But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Saviour appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour. (Titus 3:4–6)
Not by literal water, as in the laver, but by the powerful water of the Holy Spirit and his word. Paul is referring to God’s Spirit and God’s truth applied to the heart of man in the power of the Spirit, bringing repentance, faith, new life, changing his character and turning him into an obedient servant of God. Note the parallel with the furnishings in the court of the temple. The pillars were holding up the capitals—God’s objective truth. And the laver with the water—God’s Holy Spirit applying that truth subjectively to the heart, producing the miracle of the new birth and the daily cleansing of water by the word.
Solomon was faced with the difficult task of governing Israel for God, and I’ve no wonder that he said, ‘We’ll have as many lavers in this place as we can get’. And if we want to bring ourselves to behave as we should behave, let us remember to preach not merely the blood of Christ that cleanses us from the guilt of sin, but the necessity of the new birth—the regeneration of the Holy Spirit that places the life of God within us and turns rebels into obedient servants.
Lessons from the history of the house of the Lord in 1 Kings
Having looked first at the provision that God made in that ancient day in the house of the Lord for the governing of his people, we turn now to the question of what they did with the provision. Oh, that’s a mixed story and I’ll make it as painless as I can. Time demands it, so let me concentrate first on the bad bits, and we’ll end up with the good bits. Let’s start first of all with the structure.
Jeroboam’s folly in building other houses of the Lord
There was to be one house only, and every single side room had to have direct access to that house. In the course of time the nation was divided into two parts: the two tribes and the ten. It came about because towards the end of his days, instead of being keen on the work of the Lord as he used to be, Solomon didn’t want to do the work but he still wanted to be king. He married a lot of foreign women and got busy spending his money on building them idolatrous shrines to keep them happy (see 1 Kgs 11:1–8).
Well, in those circumstances, there was a young man called Jeroboam, who was certainly very keen on the Lord’s work, and he got on with it. Of course, he attracted the young folks to him, and God said in the end, ‘Okay, Jeroboam, you can have the ten tribes and lead them. Old Solomon is fooling about; you lead the ten tribes in their work for me’ (1 Kgs 11:26–39).
So God put Jeroboam over the ten tribes, and all would have been well, except for the fact that Jeroboam was a foolish man. I suppose it was fear that did it, but do you know what he went and did? Whereas God had said, ‘There shall be one house’, Jeroboam went and set up another one. In fact, another two: one in Bethel and one in Dan (see 1 Kgs 12:25–33).
‘Whatever for?’, you say.
He said like this to himself: ‘I’ve now got the control and the organization of the ten tribes, but you never know what might happen if I let them go up to the house of the Lord in Jerusalem. They might get it into their heads to return and serve Rehoboam, king of Judah, and if I should lose control of them, what would become of my position? So that won’t do; it’s not advisable to let all those folks go directly to the house of the Lord.’
So he told them a yarn. He said, ‘Look, it’s really too much bother for you to go all the way up to Jerusalem. We’ll come to a more convenient organizational arrangement. I’ll build you another house here, and you can go to that one.’ Then he would have them under his eye. Well, he didn’t tell them that, but he meant, ‘I’ll put my thumb on you’. He couldn’t trust God to control the people if the people went directly to God, so he invented an organization where the people had to come to his headquarters and not directly to God. Israel never recovered from that dire mistake.
And have Christians been guiltless in the matter? It is a very funny thing, isn’t it? You would think that people who have the right of immediate access to God would cling to it; but you all know as well as I do what happened in medieval Christendom. There arose men—popes, prelates, cardinals, bishops, archbishops and the like—who said to the people, ‘What? You come direct to God? Oh, no, you can’t come direct to God or come direct to his word. You mustn’t do that. God isn’t available to everybody just like that. You have to come to us, and we’ll tell you what the true interpretation is.’
For centuries upon centuries, the whole thing went unchallenged and was thought to be genuine Christianity. One of the great classics of Christian literature, Pilgrim’s Progress,5 was written by John Bunyan. Bless God for the memory of the man. Do you know what happened to him? We did it in England, but of course we’re ashamed of it now. He wanted to preach the gospel, but the bishop hadn’t given him permission. So he got shoved into prison by men who took it upon themselves to stand between John Bunyan and God, and tell John Bunyan what he may and may not do.
May God save us from it too. We are to have godly elders, and, if I might group myself among the young for a moment, we are to respect and obey our elders in the Lord. As all elders who are spiritual men know, the way to govern is not to stand between God and his people, but to encourage them to seek God and the power of his Holy Spirit and the enlightening of his word, so that the Lord who lives in our midst may govern us. God save us from making the mistake of interposing all sorts of human things, which have no authority in his holy word, between ourselves and God.
Lessons from the history of the house of the Lord in 2 Kings
Ahaz: his debasement of the house of the Lord
What other person shall I talk about? These are sad things and I mustn’t depress you too much, but moving on to 2 Kings there was Ahaz, king of Judah. He was a bright boy, and he went on a visit at one stage up to Damascus (2 Kgs 16:10). When he was there, he visited a heathen temple and saw an altar. ‘That’s a fine altar’, he said. ‘Our altar in the house of the Lord at Jerusalem is getting a bit old; we’ve seen it so many times we’ve become tired of it.’ So he sent a postcard home to Uriah the priest: ‘I’ve seen a marvellous altar up here. Please change the altar in the house of the Lord and make one like this’, and he sent a sketch of it on the postcard.
When he got back home, he had a look at the big sea that was standing there (v. 17). He said, ‘This is an old-fashioned-looking affair on the tops of these oxen; we must move with the times’. So he got his hacksaws out and cut the sea off the backs of the oxen and put it down on the ground. It made a change, didn’t it?
Can you imagine the impertinence of six foot of human clay altering what God had said and tampering with God’s provision? It would lessen the force of the water, so that instead of it coming up through the bellies and tumbling out in torrents through the mouths of those oxen, down there on the ground it just trickled out without any power.
After that, it’s no surprise that one day Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came up and smashed the lavers to pieces. And he did likewise with those lovely pillars; he smashed them to smithereens. Judah ended up in Babylon for their folly in thus debasing the provision that God had made.
Once again, we mustn’t talk too much about ancient Judahites and Israelites, must we? What about modern Christendom that has taken the inspired word of the apostles and said, ‘You don’t need to go by that; it’s only what Paul says’? Oh, really? And what shall we say about the latest apostates, who not only encourage people to disobey Scripture but also tell us that what we have always regarded as God’s inspired objective truth isn’t truth but merely myth? And in the name of Christ they deny his deity, his resurrection, his second coming and the inspiration of Scripture. We have lived to see the denial of God’s objective truth and the brushing aside of the power of that word as applied to human life done in the name of Christianity, and in the name of God. Christendom that does that kind of thing will end up in Babylon, as Judah did.
Josiah: his cleansing of the house of the Lord
I’d better tell you a bit about the brighter side, hadn’t I? Israel got herself into many pickles and troubles because of this kind of foolish abuse and defiance of God’s provision; but from time to time there were movements of revival and brighter days.
There was a godly young man called Josiah, and he said, ‘Now look here, it is terrible neglecting the house of the Lord like this. Let’s go through it and repair it’ (see 2 Kgs 22:4–5). So they started to clean it up, and in the process they found a book. So they got this book out and brought it to the king, and he consulted a prophetess, and lo and behold, do you know what it was? It was a copy of holy Scripture. They hadn’t read it for years upon years; they scarcely knew what it said or whether it existed. But a copy of holy Scripture it was. So they began to read it, and to their consternation and dismay, they found all sorts of things in it that they didn’t know were in the Bible—all sorts of things they were commanded to do that they hadn’t done for centuries, and all sorts of things that they were told not to do that they’d been doing for years.
They said to themselves, ‘Well, what on earth shall we do? Is this really God’s word? If it is, we’d better start obeying it.’ And that’s precisely what they did. They started obeying the newly found word of God, and do you know what it led to? It led to such a cleansing of the house of the Lord that you never did see in all your life. Talk about a spring clean! Old idols came out here, cobwebs came out there, spiders, pork and all sorts of godless and idolatrous things went outside the door, and they scrubbed the place clean (2 Kgs 22–23).
Yes, God’s word always has that effect, doesn’t it? Like the laver of olden times, if you get God’s holy word, take it seriously and do what it says, it leads to a tremendous clean-up. If you dare to preach God’s word and folks get converted, who before were merely church members and not converted, they are born again and a new power enters their lives. Then they start reading the word and it begins to clean up the way they behave. May God give us more Josiahs in our day and generation to discover the living word of God and be determined to obey it. It will lead to a mighty cleansing and a powerful reviving.
Hezekiah: his stand for the truth
Finally, there was a man called Hezekiah (2 Kgs 18). He was king of Judah when Judah was attacked by the Assyrians. Rabshakeh, the chief commander of the Assyrian hosts, came up to Jerusalem and strutted and shouted around the walls. He called out in a loud voice to the king and the people, saying, ‘Look here, it’s no good your standing there inside Jerusalem City and telling yourself that Jehovah will protect you. Who do you imagine Jehovah is? Your Jehovah is no better than the gods of Samaria and Carchemish and all the other gods that I’ve been beating up as I have progressively moved west. Your Jehovah is only another one of these gods; you’d better leave off faith in him. Give up this hoary old notion that Moses told you; it’s a lot of myth, you know. You want to give up those old-fashioned ideas and submit to us, the great Assyrians’ (see 18:28–35).
Well, here was Hezekiah, and for him to see the Assyrian army outside Jerusalem was enough to make his knees wobble any day of the week. What should he do? Here he was, king of the people to whom had been committed the great revelation of almighty God: ‘I am the Lord; beside me there is none else’. They stood against all idolatry among the nations for this cardinal truth of the uniqueness of Jehovah; and now here was the commander saying on behalf of the king of Assyria, ‘That’s a lot of nonsense; a lot of mythology. Why do you make those exclusive claims? Who do you think you are anyway, you Jews? Aren’t our religions as good as your religion? Who are you to think that your God is the unique, sole God of heaven?’
God be praised, for even though his knees knocked Hezekiah formed an alliance with the prophet Isaiah and the godly in Jerusalem, and they stood firmly for the truth that Jehovah is unique. And as they stood like pillars for the truth of God’s self-revelation, God himself proved his reality and turned the Assyrians back (19:1–7). It was at that stage that Isaiah coined a nice little bit of poetry. He said, ‘the surviving remnant of the house of Judah shall again take root downwards and bear fruit upwards’ (v. 30).
May God help us who are born again to do likewise. We live in days that get ever nearer to the final apostasy, when the church herself shall go apostate and deny the Lord who bought her and deny his objective truth. They are already doing it in many places in the name of Christ. May God give us who know the Lord the determination to be pillars, to stand firm for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints (Jude v. 3), and fearlessly hold it up to the eyes of men and women as no myth but God’s self-revealed truth: the only gospel that is able to make them wise for salvation (cf. 2 Tim 3:15).
There is much more in 1 and 2 Kings, but not more minutes on the clock. So there we must leave our studies of those ancient historical books.
Shall we pray.
O Lord, we thank thee for the provision that thou hast made for us, even more glorious than what thou didst make for Israel in the past. Help us to understand thy provision, Lord, and give us that wisdom and humbleness of heart to avail ourselves of what thou hast given us. And using it, be strong in our day to stand for thee and to hold up thy truth manfully before the eyes of the world that thy blessing may be upon us and thy power be evident in the preaching of thy word, to the salvation of souls and to the glory of thy name, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel
Introduction
So far in our survey of the Old Testament, we have studied briefly two books from the Pentateuch, the first division in the Old Testament, namely Genesis and Leviticus. And then we passed on to study two books from the Former Prophets, 1 and 2 Kings. Now I must select a book from the Latter Prophets, and I promised you at the beginning that that book would be the prophecy of Ezekiel. So, God helping me, tonight I intend to honour that promise.
Once more, we shall not be able to do anything other than pick out one of its major themes, and the one that I propose to pick out is what you might call ‘the gospel according to Ezekiel’. But so that we might see more sharply what that is in its context, I’m going to ask you to bear with me while I also map in very briefly the gospel according to the other two Major Prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah. By having all three together, we shall be able to see the differences between them more easily.
As I said when we were discussing the creation stories, the three different creation stories do not contradict each other. By supplementing each other, they tell us of creation from three different points of view. Similarly, when I talk about the gospel according to Isaiah, the gospel according to Jeremiah and the gospel according to Ezekiel and say they have differences, I do not mean that they contradict each other. I mean to say that each one of these prophets preaches God’s glorious gospel to us, but each one from a slightly different point of view.
So now let us read a few verses from each of the three Major Prophets that may serve to sum up what their gospel message is.
First of all from chapter 49 of the prophecy of Isaiah, and it is the Messiah who speaks:
And now the LORD says, he who formed me from the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him; and that Israel might be gathered to him—for I am honoured in the eyes of the LORD, and my God has become my strength—he says: ‘It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.’ (49:5–6)
And then from chapter 31 of the prophecy of Jeremiah:
Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbour and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. (31:31–34)
And finally from chapter 36 of the prophecy of Ezekiel:
I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. And I will deliver you from all your uncleannesses. And I will summon the grain and make it abundant and lay no famine upon you. I will make the fruit of the tree and the increase of the field abundant, that you may never again suffer the disgrace of famine among the nations. Then you will remember your evil ways, and your deeds that were not good, and you will loathe yourselves for your iniquities and your abominations. It is not for your sake that I will act, declares the Lord GOD; let that be known to you. Be ashamed and confounded for your ways, O house of Israel. Thus says the Lord GOD: On the day that I cleanse you from all your iniquities, I will cause the cities to be inhabited, and the waste places shall be rebuilt. (36:24–33)
The Lord give us good understanding of his word.
God’s plan of salvation
I cannot tell, but it may have occurred to you at some time or other to ask yourself the question, ‘Why didn’t God send Jesus Christ our Lord into the world to save us immediately after Adam sinned and fell? Wouldn’t it have made life very much simpler if God had immediately sent his Son into the world to save sinners by dying for us?’
The growing wickedness of sin
Well, the first thing to notice is that God didn’t do it. And the second thing is to say that perhaps the reason why he didn’t do it at once is because they would not have been prepared for him to do any such thing, and for this very good reason. While it was obvious that something very serious had happened, mankind was far from realizing what an intricate, complicated and terrible thing sin is. For when Adam sinned, it was but a little seed, so to speak, and no one had the slightest idea then what a vast tree sin would grow into. Therefore, God waited to send his Son into the world. It was no use sending salvation to people who didn’t realize what it was they needed to be saved from, and therefore you will find the following pattern of things in the Old Testament.
God immediately announced the part of the programme of his salvation that met Adam’s need. But as life went on, men and women began to sin more, and some new aspect of sin came to light. Then God in his mercy revealed a further aspect of his salvation to meet that particular need. When Abraham came along, he too was a sinner, of course, but he didn’t have the Law of God and never realized, as later generations would have to, what a complicated thing sin is. Abraham sinned as perhaps a little child sins and knows it’s done wrong, but doesn’t have the developed conscience to know how deeply it has done wrong.
Therefore, after centuries of development, when we come towards the later parts of the Old Testament we must expect to find that sin has become an exceedingly complicated, dark, evil and unimaginably wicked thing, such as you never would have dreamed of at the beginning. For instance, Adam was in a beautiful garden and in the ingratitude of his heart he dared to sin against God. Fancy sinning against God when God had given him such a lovely garden. But I’ll tell you something worse. Israel didn’t just have a few lovely apples, a few pears, a few peaches, and one or two grapes hanging on lovely vines; Israel had the very presence of almighty God enshrined in the middle of Jerusalem. They were allowed to go into his house and address him in person. Yet, having almighty God living on their very doorstep in Jerusalem, Israel still sinned against him. They grew so careless and outrageous in their sins that they not only defiled their own houses, but they had no compunction in defiling the very house of almighty God himself.
Sin developed into an arrogant and filthy thing, and therefore you must expect the reading of the prophets to often be very gloomy. Please don’t complain against God for that, and say, ‘What a woeful picture those dreary prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel paint’. Well, of course they do! You might as well complain against a textbook of pathology, and say, ‘What awful pictures those terrible medics put in their books. When you read them, it makes you feel all squeamish. Horrible books!’ Well, yes, books of pathology are horrible books; they tell us all the possible diseases that the human frame is liable to contract. But he would be a fool who refused to take notice of them. Therefore, we must brace ourselves to read our prophets and learn how ‘sin when it is fully grown brings forth death’ (Jas 1:15).
The glorious way of salvation
But then these prophets were inspired of God, not only to show us our sin but to show us our salvation, which they do in the most glorious colours. If Isaiah diagnoses human sin to be a particular thing, he will have a gospel message perfectly adequate to meet it. And Jeremiah says, ‘Yes, what Isaiah says is true, but I can tell you something more. You haven’t heard the half about sin when you’ve listened to Isaiah; I can tell you stories that will make your hair stand up on end.’ Then Ezekiel can say, ‘And God, who foresaw it all, has a salvation big enough to meet even this particular degradation of sin’.
So we shall be looking very briefly at these prophets and asking what their gospel message is. There’s scarcely a book in the whole Bible, you know, that doesn’t preach the gospel. In fact, there’s scarcely a comma in God’s book that isn’t aimed at our salvation! But as the prophets try to put their gospel before us, they will first ask us to notice the sin that the gospel is designed to save us from.
What is the gospel message according to Isaiah?
So now, very briefly, and travelling over ground that I’m sure you know very well, Isaiah says, ‘my gospel is the Messiah himself’. He is the one whom we in our day know as Jesus Christ our Lord. But what does the gospel of God’s perfect servant mean? To understand what it means you’ll have to consider the background of Israel’s utterly miserable and wretched failure as the people of God to be God’s worthy servants.
God’s purpose for Israel
Let me remind you what Israel was supposed to have been. God called Abraham out of Ur of Chaldees and made a nation from him. We now call them the Jews; in those days they were called the Hebrews. God called him out of the Gentile nations so that he should be his servant as his witness to men and women (see Gen 12). Abraham was brought up in a civilization that was exceedingly beautiful but eaten through with idolatry. When the God of heaven appeared to him, he called Abraham out and gave him a personal experience of the reality of the living God in order that Abraham might become a witness to the nations of the real God, as distinct from their miserable and wretched idols.
God then rescued Abraham’s descendants out of the oppression in Egypt and once more gave them a vivid personal experience of the reality of the living God and his great salvation, showing them that God is alive—he is no dead idol. His purpose was that Israel should serve him in gladsome worship and be a witness to him to the ends of the earth (see Exod 12).
Israel’s compromise with idolatry
Alas, what happened to Israel? If they had been a people who had lived all their lives in abominable idolatries, you may have excused it. But it was Israel: a people who had known the living God, had seen his miracles and his presence was in their midst. Israel as a whole went back into the same miserable old idolatries as the heathen nations around her. It sounds incredible, but the record is there. They hadn’t been five minutes out of Egypt before they were dancing around the golden calf (see Exod 32).
King Saul himself, their first king, before he died was seeking after spiritism in a witch’s coven (see 1 Sam 28). And presently, people who had known the love and kindness of God were taking their babies and sacrificing them to idols of Molech (see 2 Kgs 23:10).
How could it ever be? The answer is sin. We haven’t a tenth of the concept of sin that we ought to have. It has pervaded the very vitals and sense of the human heart, and will invariably and inevitably always lead us back to idolatry, which is to trust in anything rather than God himself. And so a large part of Isaiah is taken up with reprimanding God’s ancient people Israel for their backsliding into idolatry.
You say, ‘Isn’t idolatry loving things more than we love God?’.
Well, it can be. But, you know, few ancient people loved their idols, and I suspect few modern idolaters love theirs either. Most of them are too hideous-looking to love, aren’t they? Idolatry, in the first place, is trusting something other than God, and the temptation was always with Israel. They looked perhaps at the farmer over the border in Moab, who this year happened to have luscious crops, and they found the temptation irresistible. ‘Perhaps there is something in their spiritism after all. We’ve got to make a living, so why not give it a try?’ Not daring to trust God, they let their human hearts take them away to put their faith in idols.
Isaiah becomes very sarcastic as he tries to show them the folly of trusting in idols. ‘Look at that man over there,’ he says, ‘he’s making a god for himself. He hacks off a few branches from a beautiful tree, puts them on the fire and cooks his breakfast. He eats his breakfast, and then with the rest of the wood he makes an idol and bows down in front of it. Fancy worshipping the wood that cooked your breakfast!’ (see Isa 44:9–20).
Then it becomes very pathetic when Isaiah exposes the folly of idolatry. ‘Look at these people in this village,’ he says, ‘living there, with their idols sitting on perches. One of these days they’ll see a big cloud of dust on the horizon that gets bigger and nearer, and suddenly they’ll realize that their enemies are coming to take them. In a panic, they’ll get all their household goods and put all the pots and pans and bits of furniture on their old donkey, until the donkey’s legs are beginning to sink through the dust. They’re just about to run for their lives to get away from the enemy when someone asks where are their gods. Well, you can’t leave your gods behind, so they get hold of their gods and heave them up on the back of the donkey, whose legs go further down than ever because the poor donkey has to carry the gods. Instead of the gods saving them and carrying them, they have to carry their gods; and instead of helping them to be saved, it hastens their ruin’ (see 46:1–2; 6–7).
When will we learn the old lesson of idolatry? The mark of idolatry is that you always have to carry your god. The mark of the true God is that he carries you. That is the secret of God’s salvation:
even to your old age I am he, and to grey hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save. (Isa 46:4)
But it’s one thing to show the absurdity of idolatry, as Isaiah does so trenchantly; it’s another thing to cure it, isn’t it? Nowadays, many of us wouldn’t dream of bowing down to idols, but we are idolatrous. Our trust is not really in God; it is still in the works of our own hands. Our merit, our morality, our riches, our station in life—be it what it will, we tend to put our faith in the works of our own hands. How will you break that cardinal sin of man’s trust in himself and in the works of his hands?
God’s remedy for their idolatry
That’s where Isaiah’s glorious gospel comes in. As a testimony for God among the nations, Israel failed miserably. Instead of witnessing to the true God who could save mankind, Israel herself, the unfruitful servant of God that she was, latched onto idolatry. But God had his answer to that unfaithful servant: ‘Behold, my servant,’ he says, ‘shall act wisely; he shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted’ (Isa 52:13).
In God’s name, Isaiah prophesies of the coming of Jesus Christ our Lord, God’s perfect servant. ‘The Lord GOD has given me the tongue of those who are taught . . . [He] has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious’ (50:4–5). For his long thirty-three years, our Lord lived with utter faith in God. And when at last it led him to the cross of Calvary, still he trusted in God. As the crowds passed by, they said, ‘There you are. That’s what trust in God does for a man. Look at him: “He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him”’ (see Matt 27:39–43). But Christ remained on that cross, his faith in God unbroken.
And I will tell you more. As we look again at that cross, let us do so with Isaiah’s words ringing in our ears. Why was he there? Why was God’s perfect sinless Son and servant nailed to a cross? The answer comes back:
He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities . . . and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. . . . by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities. (see Isa 53:5–6, 11 KJV).
What is the basic problem? How will you win back the human heart to dare to trust God? It is our problem here tonight, isn’t it? For a human being to live in this world not trusting God, it is a contradiction of our creaturely status. And for a human being to pass into the great eternity without trusting God, that is to go out into everlasting disaster.
How can I be brought to trust in God?
There is one supreme place in all human history and geography where the human soul can find God and the ability to trust God; and that is the cross of Jesus Christ our Lord, God’s sinless servant. It tells me that when we all like sheep have gone astray and turned every one to his own way, God still loved us and would still save us. To show us his love, his Son died at Calvary to bear the penalty of the sin that we ourselves should have borne (see 53:6). I ask you to look at Calvary and ponder what Jesus Christ is doing there on Calvary’s cross and why God’s Son so suffered. My friend, if that doesn’t provoke in you a trust in God, then you must be lost forever in your unbelief.
But this as I say is elementary, for we know and have long since preached the gospel according to Isaiah: the gospel of God’s perfect servant, who was wounded for our transgressions to bring us back to faith in God.
What is the gospel message according to Jeremiah?
So then, what is the gospel according to Jeremiah? Well, Jeremiah preaches the gospel in terms of God’s provision of the new covenant: ‘Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah’ (31:31). According to Jeremiah, that is the glorious news of the gospel. We shall have to ask ourselves therefore what he means by a new covenant? Why does he call this one new?
The old covenant
To understand the gospel according to Jeremiah, you’ll have to look back in Old Testament history to the old covenant. The old covenant was a covenant that God made with Israel on the basis of the law of Moses. Now, this is a little bit tricky because sometimes we don’t always understand clearly the difference between the covenant that God made, and the law of Moses upon which that covenant was built. Let me therefore use a humble and very simple illustration to get it across to you.
I gather that here in Malaysia, like in England, you have cookery books with lovely pictures of all the beautiful meals that can be made if only the cooks would pay attention to the directions in them. I want you to imagine a young man, so foolish (or perhaps so wise) as having decided that he would like to marry a beautiful young lady. He buys one of those cookery books, and he says, ‘My dear, I am going to give this to you as a wedding present. I love you so much.’ And, of course, she gets the hint—‘Hmmm, I suppose you would like me to make some of these dishes?’ And he says, ‘Yes, my dear, I would like that very much. My favourite is on page 101.’
Well, that’s fair enough, isn’t it? She’s got the cookery book, all the rules and regulations, and if she keeps them she will turn out some very good meals. The cookery book is the law that tells you how to cook, isn’t it?
But suppose the man is so foolish as to go to the young lady, and say, ‘My dear, I propose marrying you, but on condition. Do you see this cookery book? I am prepared to have you as my wife and to maintain you as my wife, on condition that you cook all the recipes in this book in their proper season and that you cook them perfectly. You shall never burn the beans or spoil the tomatoes; you shall do it all one hundred per cent. If you promise to fulfil all the rules in this cookery book you may be my wife and I shall be your husband. But get it into your head now that if you ever spoil one of these dishes I shall be obliged to divorce you.’
That would be another story, wouldn’t it? That wouldn’t merely be the law of cookery; it would be taking the law of cookery and making it the basis of a covenant between the man and his wife. I can’t imagine any woman who would ever marry a man on those terms.
God gave Israel a law and it was an excellent law; holy and righteous and just and good. There was nothing wrong with the law. It was a superb law, and if only Israel had kept it, they would have been a superb people. But God didn’t merely give them the law; God made a covenant with Israel. He said to them, ‘I’m prepared to be your God and grant you my guarantee that I’ll receive you as my people, on the condition that you keep all this law absolutely one hundred per cent. But if you break it, I’ll dismiss you.’
Do you know what Israel said? They said, ‘Oh, all right. Very good. Why not?’ (see Exod 19:7–8). Then Moses told the people all the words of the Lord and all the rules (see Exod 24). ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘that’s all right, “All the words that the LORD has spoken we will do”.’
‘Perhaps I’d better write it in a book and read it to you,’ said Moses. So he wrote it in a book and read it in the hearing of all the people. And the people said, ‘Yes, that’s all right, we’re happy to be God’s people on the condition that we keep this law’. Then God gave Moses the tablets of stone, with the law and the commandment (v. 12).
The terms of the covenant that God made with them were that he would be their God and they would be his people, so long as they kept this law. But the covenant had scarcely been made when they broke it in its most important point (see Exod 32). More years of experience merely sufficed to show their wretched inability to keep that law. They broke it in every way. They broke the big things and they broke the little things. They despised, rejected and profaned even the sacrifices that the law offered them as a way of forgiveness, and ruined their whole relationship with God (see Mal 1).
We mustn’t suppose that our hearts are any better than theirs. In pondering the thing, Jeremiah came to this conclusion: ‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?’ (Jer 17:9). The sin of a few savages in the jungle is serious, isn’t it, and sad; but how will you ever describe the sin of a people who once were in a covenant relationship with God and broke that covenant?
Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped [not merely the mouths of Jews], and the whole world may be held accountable to God. (Rom 3:19)
The new covenant
But then, what is the gospel according to Jeremiah? Well, it’s no good repeating the same old covenant, and saying, ‘Now look, if you’ll be good boys and girls and really keep the law, then you can be saved’. What a sad misunderstanding it has been, even in Christendom, that so very often Christian preachers have stood up and told the people that the way to be saved is to do your best to keep God’s law. They are thousands of years too late; God has demonstrated over centuries that the human heart is so bad that it cannot keep that law. If people are ever to be saved, some other means must be found.
Praise God, that means has been found. ‘The days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel’ (Jer 31:31). Firstly: God’s law will not now be written merely on tables of stone, leaving it to the people to do their best to keep those laws; but, ‘I will write it on their hearts. . . . For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more’, says God (vv. 33–34). ‘By my Spirit, I will write them on your very heart,’ he says. That is, ‘I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules’ (Ezek 36:27). He will give them a new nature, which has the power to do the law that God wishes them to do, and their sins and iniquities he will remember no more.
I mustn’t stay on the details of that covenant. Most of you will know them well, for Sunday by Sunday you who are Christians gather and take the cup of remembrance from the hand of the Lord Jesus. And as you take it, you celebrate the forming of the new covenant whereby Christ writes his laws on our hearts and gives us not only the command but the power to perform the command (see Heb 10:15–23).
What is the gospel message according to Ezekiel?
We’ve heard the gospel according to Isaiah and the gospel according to Jeremiah. That leads me finally to ask, what is the gospel according to Ezekiel? For Israel, it was God in their midst and his Spirit within: the cleansing of people from all their defilements and the erection of God’s true and perfect temple in their midst.
Israel despised God’s provision for them
To understand the significance of that, you must let Ezekiel tell you once more about Israel’s disastrous failure—their desecration and pollution of all that was sacred, all that was holy, and all that was divine and beautiful in life. They took the lovely, beautiful things of nature, and the lovely, beautiful things of God’s Spirit and his very house itself, and defiled them.
It is an incredibly heartbreaking story (see Ezek 20). God saved Israel out of Egypt; he allowed them to build him a temple in Jerusalem, and he came and dwelt there. The glory of God was over the city of Jerusalem. He meant human life to be glorious and beautiful, and it is Ezekiel who tells us in his prophecy of those lovely, beautiful things that God intends for mankind.
God has given us life; but he doesn’t merely give us life. Existence can be a very pale thing, can’t it? God wanted life to be something beautiful and glorious. Therefore, we read in chapter 16 that God went after Israel when they were a poor, slavish people. He found them in the wilderness as a poor outcast girl, and God himself began courting Israel there. Using old-fashioned imagery, the prophet says that God had her washed and cleansed and dressed properly, and he adorned her with ornaments. He made her a beautiful queen, and he loved her.
Not content with that, he brought her into the land of Palestine and in his divine ingenuity he thought of all the lovely things he could give Israel—‘You ate fine flour and honey and oil. You grew exceedingly beautiful and advanced to royalty. . . . through the splendour that I had bestowed on you, declares the Lord GOD’ (16:13–14). He gave them to Israel as a lover gives gifts to his bride, and he sought to fill Israel’s heart with joy and delight at the richness and the beauty of life.
To crown it all, God stationed himself in Israel in the temple, and his glory was there. And what did Israel do? Why, they daubed the very walls of the temple with their filthiness, with their debased superstitions, with their perverted sexual immoralities in the name of religion, with their old heathen idolatry; so much so that the very glory of God had to take wings and fly away (see Ezek chs. 8–10). It’s a terrible thing about sin—do take it seriously. Sin looks so attractive when it starts, but it will pollute and desecrate, destroy and defile everything that is beautiful in life.
Satan’s rebellion against God
What is the secret of it? In his mystical language, Ezekiel traces the origin of this kind of thing. He is given to look behind the scenes at the history of his satanic majesty himself (see Ezek 28). Few people realize that Satan was originally the most glorious creature that ever existed. The highest of all God’s handiwork, he was the anointed guardian cherub—high and exalted and beautiful and intelligent, fit to wait upon God in God’s immediate presence (v. 14). And how did this exalted creature fall? He trusted in his own beauty, says holy writ (see v. 17). There came a terrible moment in his experience when that exalted and beautiful creature made himself the goal and used his beauty for his own satisfaction. He chose to serve his own joy and his own pleasure, instead of making God the object of his heart and love, using his beauty and directing the whole of his energies to please the Creator who had made him.
At that stage, Satan’s joys and pleasures were the most refined that anybody could have imagined. And what glorious joys and pleasures they were, when he took them gratefully from God and let his gratitude flow back to God and move him to serve God. But, as I say, there came the moment when Satan allowed himself to be the goal of everything. His beauty, his enjoyment, his feelings and his ambitions were the goal, and there broke out in him that vast rebellion, when a creature who was made to serve God turned round and made himself the goal of his existence. All of us have done it, haven’t we?
God’s gifts are meant to draw us to himself
The great city of Tyre in the ancient world was notorious and famous for the quality of its life. The Tyrians weren’t savages; they were the great merchants of the ancient world. Like the Americans, who in recent times said, ‘We must make everybody come to believe that refrigerators are necessities’, the Tyrians were the people who said, ‘We must raise the standard of life, bring in all the consumer goods—curtains, rugs, silver, gold, chariots and all the fine artwork. We must get people to see that life is a many-splendoured thing.’ Lovely and glorious as the articles of their trade were, this was a fearful mistake. They thought that life’s glory lay in the enjoyment of things apart from the living God, and as a society they fell into the most brutal child sacrifice the world has seen. And God destroyed them (see Ezek 28:1–19).
And what about the Jews (see Ezek 16)? God courted and married them, so to speak, and gave them his lover’s gifts to engage Israel’s heart until she served him loyally. But in the end, she took the gifts but didn’t care anymore for the lover of her soul. She made the gifts themselves the end and her enjoyment of them the goal, and she forgot God for days on end.
And who among us hasn’t done the same thing? Some of us could even be guilty of doing it in our spiritual experiences. Haven’t there been times when we have sought God, not for God’s own sake but for the joy that forgiveness brings or for the peace that he can give? We will serve God as long as we feel good, as long as our feelings are pleasant and our Christianity engages our pleasure. But let difficult times come, and we don’t want to know Christ. Instead of serving him, it becomes apparent that we are serving our own enjoyment, our own feelings and our own satisfaction. Travel that pathway long, and you will destroy the bloom and all that is beautiful in life. For God is our creator; we were made to live for him. If we turn it round and live for ourselves, that is to destroy the whole reason why we were made, and we will turn ourselves into a veritable Dead Sea—a meaningless existence.
The work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts
Ezekiel’s gospel message for Israel was to build the temple once more in the middle of the land so that it would be the centre of life, and all their activity should flow to that temple as one great concert of praise. The marketplace, the arts and sciences and home life would all be conducted for the glory of the God who lived in that temple. Everything they did would be to serve his pleasure.
You say, ‘Is it possible?’.
Not as we are—fallen creatures of clay who turn so readily in upon ourselves and make ourselves the goal and therefore the dead end of life—but it can become possible. For Ezekiel has a gospel, and it is the message of God’s Holy Spirit:
I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you . . . (Ezek 36:25–27)
And the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us; for after saying, ‘This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws on their hearts, and write them on their minds’, then he adds, ‘I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.’ (Heb 10:15–17)
He will give us a heart that shall love God because it is a heart born of the Spirit of God; a divine nature that naturally turns to love God because it is God’s Spirit in the heart.
I suspect that it was foolish of me to try and preach to you the gospel according to Isaiah in one night. To have attempted to sketch in the gospel according to Jeremiah and Ezekiel as well is perhaps the pinnacle of folly. And yet perhaps my attempt has done something to stir your interest in these long books. They are important, even if gloomy, in diagnosing for us our sin, yet they abound with the rapture of God’s glory. For, however dark our sin may be, he has a gospel and a salvation that can meet our need and transform us into loyal and true servants of God; into obedient subjects of the King according to his new covenant; and transform our hearts and make us lovers of Christ, fit to be his bride for all eternity to live for his sake and for his pleasure alone.
May the Lord bless his word to that end for his name’s sake.
Shall we just pray before we have our break.
O God, we thank thee that thou hast devised a salvation that is fit to meet our need. We thank thee that this gives us courage, therefore, to face our own hearts and their naughtiness and to allow thy Spirit to plumb the depths of our sin and depravity and show our ugly selves to ourselves. We pray that we might thus use thy word, that we may not flinch from discovering ourselves, because in Christ thy Son we have a salvation big enough to save us from our sin, blood to cleanse, and thy Spirit to regenerate. And O Lord, we thank thee that, as thy salvation proceeds within our hearts, the future grows ever the brighter unto the dawning of that coming day when sin shall be a story of the past, and there shall be nothing left but unsullied glory stretching before us to all eternity in the glad service of God. Thus bless thy word to our hearts, we beseech thee, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
6. First Chronicles
Introduction
For our example of a book taken from the third division of the Old Testament, tonight we are to consider together the first book of Chronicles. Though it is a historical book, 1 Chronicles does not come among the Former Prophets in the second division of the Old Testament, but in the third division, called the Writings. In fact, in the Hebrew canon 1 and 2 Chronicles are the last books in the Old Testament.
Together, the first and second books of Chronicles give us a survey of Old Testament history right from the beginning, from the creation of Adam, up to the time of the restoration of Israel to their land after the captivity in Babylon—the restoration that was commissioned by the emperor, King Cyrus. There are books in the Old Testament that take the story a little bit beyond that; notably Ezra and Nehemiah, and the postexilic prophets Zechariah, Haggai and Malachi. Nevertheless, they are detailed studies of a short period, whilst, as I say, 1 and 2 Chronicles amount to a survey of almost the whole of Old Testament history.
We shall have to content ourselves with considering 1 Chronicles this evening, but we shall be asking of this book whether it has any distinct philosophy of history. Can it discern any pattern in the affairs of mankind? Is life getting anywhere, or is it one accident with no rhyme, no reason, no pattern, nor any observable goal?
God’s purposes with mankind
We’ll start to read in the first chapter:
Adam, Seth, Enosh; Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared; Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech; Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The sons of Japheth: Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras. The sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah. The sons of Javan: Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, and Rodanim. (1 Chron 1:1–7)
Now we’ll read from the last chapter:
And they made Solomon the son of David king the second time, and they anointed him as prince for the LORD, and Zadok as priest. Then Solomon sat on the throne of the LORD as king in place of David his father. And he prospered, and all Israel obeyed him. (29:22–23)
Now I have the feeling that 1 Chronicles will not be the favourite reading of exactly everybody here present this evening, and there is, of course, a very good reason for that. It opens with nine chapters of names—almost nothing else but a solid array of names. And then after a few chapters you meet the phenomenon all over again—chapter after chapter after chapter full of almost nothing else but names. I guarantee that there are many Christians who, when they come to 1 Chronicles in their daily readings, think it advisable perhaps to take it as read and skip the chapters with all the names in them. For truth to tell, they’re not only names, but most of them are difficult, and some of them are impossible to pronounce anyway.
Names—thousands of them! And, of course, we never knew them. It would be different, if your mother’s name was in 1 Chronicles; and if your uncles and aunts and grandparents were there I guarantee that you would have us read 1 Chronicles. With what tremendous pride you would point to it. But these folks? We never knew them. What are they to us now but names on a bit of paper?
It’s a thing to think about, isn’t it? Once upon a time, every one of those names represented a human personality born into this world with all the potential and hope of a human child; a personality that developed and flowered as best it might, with all its hopes and ambitions and fears and desires. A whole microcosm of human interest that was born and grew and lived and married and had children, and in the end died—every single one of those names.
Now today you say, ‘What are they but a name on a bit of paper?’ and you’re not interested. Well, be careful, because one day you’ll be just a name on a bit of paper. Whatever your name is, that personality of yours and all your hopes and aspirations—the you that is the human being—tell me, when you’ve lived out your little seventy years, will you be something more than just a name on a bit of paper that nobody is interested in?
What are we going to make of this phenomenon? Generation after generation, like the waves beating in on the Atlantic coast, there come thousands of people into our world. Each one of them is given a name, and then they go; the next generation comes and they go; and the next generation comes and they go. Millions upon millions—myriads of names of human beings.
Tell me, what is it all about, and where is it getting us? Is it just going round in circles, with one generation being born and the next coming along and pushing it into the dustbin? Or is there some purpose and plan visible in human history that gives rise to some hope that the human phenomenon is not in vain, but as each generation goes on it is reaching and progressing towards some worthy goal?
That is the question we shall be asking of 1 Chronicles. And if we take the Chronicler seriously, we shall very soon find that he does perceive a plan in human history: humankind is moving forward and there is a glorious prospect in front of this human race.
What is the gospel message according to 1 Chronicles?
Consider in a nutshell what the Chronicler’s message is: The goal of history is that a man shall sit on the throne of the Lord. He starts at the very beginning with Adam, the first man who ever was, and out of the generations and the nations that were born of Adam the Chronicler sees a unique nation arise, whom we now call the Jews. They develop, and after a few generations, as the Chronicler comes to the midpoint of his work he tells us that ‘Solomon sat on the throne of the LORD’ (29:23). For the Chronicler, that is the peak of his history; afterwards he tells how things rather declined. But this is the summit: at one stage a real human man sat on the throne of the Lord.
As you read it, perhaps you say to yourself that this is an oriental exaggeration. Isn’t that rather large language to use of the fact that King Solomon sat on a throne in Jerusalem in the tiny little state of Judah? Why call it ‘the throne of the LORD’? Well, perhaps to our ears it sounds like an exaggeration. The Chronicler called it the throne of the Lord because he believed that those kings in Jerusalem were appointed by God. David and Solomon were God’s viceroys on earth, and in that sense they were sitting on a throne appointed by the Lord.
But you know, as we read this ancient summary of history, don’t our minds immediately leap ahead, and we begin to see that in this summary of Old Testament history we have not merely historic fact, but prophetic prototype? Read on in your Old Testament and across into the New, and you will find that these words take on a much more profound meaning. If Solomon sat on the throne of the Lord in Judah, isn’t it also written that man shall yet sit on the very throne of God at the pinnacle of the universe? No, I’ve got it wrong! It is written not merely that he shall, but that he already does. As we sit here in this room, it is the fact that a man, who is truly human with flesh and bones as we have—a man who walked here on our earth with two feet on terra firma—that real man, Jesus Christ our Lord, is enthroned at this very moment and sits upon the throne of the Lord in heaven (see Heb 1:3).
who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil 2:6–11)
The Epistle to the Ephesians and its fellow, the Epistle to the Colossians, tell us that the Jesus who worked at the carpenter’s bench is seated ‘far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come’ (Eph 1:21; see also Col 1:16–17).
Addressing one of his churches in a place called Laodicea, our blessed Lord himself reminded them that he had conquered and sat down with his Father on his throne. If that were not wonderful enough, he says to his people, ‘The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne’ (see Rev 3:21).
In this early summary of history, we can see in prototype the pattern that is developing in terms of the purpose of God with man. Man was made in the image of God, and though he fell abysmally into sin God proceeded with his purpose. It is God’s good pleasure that one day man shall sit on the very throne of God, reigning throughout this vast universe as God’s viceroy and executive. This is no myth, for, since the Chronicler wrote, marvellous things have happened. God himself has become incarnate and visited our planet; Jesus Christ, God’s incarnate Son, the true man, has returned to glory and sits on the throne of the universe, merely waiting until his enemies are made the footstool of his feet (Heb 10:13). That, then, is the broad plan of history.
The stages leading to Solomon sitting on the throne of the Lord
Let us now trace the stages by which the Chronicler sees history develop. How do you get from Adam to the point where Solomon sat on the throne of the Lord? There are five stages:
| Stage one | 1:1–10:14 | The rise of Israel from among the nations and the appearing of God’s true king |
| Stage two | 11:1–14:7 | The establishment of the kingdom under God’s true king and the founding of Jerusalem as the nation’s capital city |
| Stage three | 14:8–18:17 | The bringing up of the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem |
| Stage four | 19:1–22:19 | The choosing of the site for the temple of God |
| Stage five | 23:1–29:30 | The preparation of the materials and organization for the building of the temple of God |
Stage one (1:1–10:14)
Look back on that first stage, says the Chronicler, and you will see Adam, the developing Gentile nations and the rise of Israel out of those nations, until you come to the point when God has his first true king ready, the prototype of the reigning house that shall one day control the universe. In summary, stage one covers the period leading up to the rise of God’s true king, the prototype of the coming Messiah.
Stage two (11:1–14:7)
The second stage is the establishment of that kingdom under God’s true king:
And David knew that the LORD had established him as king over Israel, and that his kingdom was highly exalted for the sake of his people Israel. (1 Chr 14:2)
Not only was David established in his kingdom in that second stage, but something else tremendously significant took place. When David was appointed king, almost the first thing he did was to lead his army to Jerusalem, capture the city and turn it into the capital of the newly joined nation. David was the man who welded the ten tribes to the two tribes. When he received the nation, they were in various bits and pieces, and what they sorely needed was a heart—some central place, some central object that would appeal to their loyalties and cement the nation together. With a master stroke of policy, David hit upon a plan. He went to Jebus, took the city, renamed it Jerusalem and gave it to all twelve tribes as their capital city. It became the city where everyone in the whole nation felt at home. It mattered not which tribe they belonged to—Benjamin, Dan, or Ephraim—they all took it to heart as their capital and political headquarters.
I’ll leave you to judge the tremendous success that attended David’s move. During the centuries, Jerusalem became the very heartthrob of that nation. The first time the pilgrims set eyes on the Jerusalem that they’d loved and longed for, they sang, ‘Our feet have been standing within your gates, O Jerusalem!’ (Ps 122:2). And to this very present time, the city of Jerusalem in the Middle East remains a world focal point of interest to three major world religions; a veritable world centre to which their eyes are drawn as if by a magnet. It was David who first got the idea of taking the city of Jebus and renaming it Jerusalem, making it a headquarters for his nation and subsequently therefore as a headquarters for the world.
Stage three (14:8–18:17)
And what was the next stage in the programme? We’ve had stage one: the rise of Israel and the appearing of the king who shall be the prototype of the world ruler. The second stage was the taking of Jerusalem City, which would subsequently be the world capital.
In the third stage, if you look at 18:14, which begins the last paragraph of the stage, you’ll find it says, ‘So David reigned over all Israel, and he administered justice and equity to all his people’. What, then, is this third stage? What dramatic new thing did David do this time? Well, having already conquered Jerusalem and given it as a heart politically to the people, this time he brought up the ark of the God of Israel and stationed it there, and that made Jerusalem City the nation’s heart twice-over. For now, it was not only their heart politically, but with the ark of the Lord there, it was also their heart spiritually. In other words, Jerusalem City was now the political and spiritual headquarters of the nation.
Stage four (19:1–22:19)
As we turn to look at stage four, you say, ‘What dramatic thing happened here? We’ve had the choice of the king, the setting up of Jerusalem City as the nation’s headquarters, and the bringing up of the ark with the presence of God central to this city.’ Now in this fourth stage, you’ll read of the choosing of the place that was to be the site of the temple of God in Jerusalem—that temple to which Judah and Israel should always look, however far flung they were throughout the whole earth. It was on this occasion and in this part of history that the site was chosen and Solomon commissioned to build the temple (22:6).
Stage five (23:1–29:30)
The fifth stage is leading to the climax, and you will notice immediately in verse 1, ‘When David was old and full of days, he made Solomon his son king over Israel’. This is the final stage of David’s life and he made Solomon king in the sense of being coregent with him. Then we read that they made Solomon king the second time, in his own right, independent of his father (29:22–23). So the last section of 1 Chronicles gives us the story of David’s last days. He had been a great monarch and had fought many battles. King though he was, like all the other kings who had lived, he realized that presently he would go out into eternity.
How then should he fill his last years? What would he do with them? How could he do something that would last and be significant when he was gone? So he spent his last years gathering material that would eventually be used by Solomon to build the great temple of God at Jerusalem. He also used his last years to organize his subjects so that, when the day of peace should come, their lives would be organized around that temple and they’d all serve God and be blessed by his presence.
The New Testament fulfilment
Let’s go over these five stages and just sum them up for a moment.
In the first stage, there is the rise of Israel, leading to the true king who should govern his subjects and organize them into some pattern of activity.
Christ will organize our activity in time and eternity
And as we think of the early Old Testament story, our minds as Christians go to Christ. Solomon and David have long since gone and they were but prototypes; but in the course of human history God eventually raised up Jesus the Messiah of David’s seed.
What for? To make sense of human life. He will take these endless names of people who have lived here on this planet, and if they will allow him he will build them into something significant. He will make them meaningful and organize them for time and eternity into activity centred on the presence of God and living to the glory of God. Jesus Christ is the great organizer of the vast multitude of human names.
In the second stage, there is David’s capture of Jerusalem as a capital city. We’ve thought just now of its significance and how it still retains its status as a world capital on earth.
The Jerusalem that is above
But as Christians, when we think of that our minds go beyond it and we see another capital city. Not an earthly Jerusalem but ‘the Jerusalem above . . . and she is our mother’ (Gal 4:26). We think of the city that Abraham looked for, ‘for he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God’ (Heb 11:10).
And don’t we who know the Saviour feel our hearts leap? We say, ‘Yes, thank God, my name likewise is written in the citizen lists of heaven’. Our citizenship is in heaven, in that new Jerusalem, the Jerusalem that is above, from where we look for the Saviour (Phil 3:20). That lovely city, where the citizens are all freeborn and free (see Gal 4), based upon the foundation of the apostles (Rev 21:14); and they have right of entry because they are redeemed by the blood of the Lamb (Rev 5:9). They can call themselves whatever they like here on earth (and they do sometimes call themselves some funny names, I warrant you), but if they have trusted the Saviour they belong to him. The Jerusalem above is the mother of us all, and in that glorious city—the heart and centre of God’s great universe—we shall be undivided for all eternity.
In the third stage, at the bringing up of the ark, there was the stationing of the presence of God, which was central to life.
Christ in us and in our midst
Our blessed Lord Jesus Christ has done that for every individual, because he is the ark himself. Christ is the one who has taught us and made it possible for us to live a life that is thoroughly God-centred. He is the presence of God, ‘For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily’ (Col 2:9). He comes and lives in the heart of every believer, and in every single assembly that meets in his name he presences himself among them. And in that great eternal city John saw God and the Lamb at the centre of all that vast throng (see Rev 21:22).
In the fourth stage, there was the choosing of the temple site. Now, when you read of the choosing of the temple site in the Old Testament, it’s not merely a matter of choosing a site geographically that is big enough to take a large building; it is something more profound than that.
What took place in the temple?
The site upon which the temple at Jerusalem was founded was specially chosen because of the profound thing that took place there. It was the most profound experience of human sin that you could imagine and the most profound exhibition of the grace of God that you could possibly conceive. It was for that heart-moving experience that the temple was built. Why so? Well, there would never be anywhere on earth more calculated to provoke the human spirit to praise than what happened there, and should one day happen there again.
As I said before, you know as well as I do that you can build a beautiful temple, a colossal cathedral, or a Jalan Imbi Chapel, a delightful building on a very suitable site. You can gather together in it, but not have one spark of worship in your heart if you’re not careful. A temple without any worship in the hearts of the people isn’t much use. How will you contrive not merely a temple, but a temple full of people who are brimming over with worship and blessing and praise to God? The temple site was chosen because of what happened there that would produce centuries of worship to God, which we shall consider later.
What took place at Calvary?
What our blessed Lord has done in Jerusalem City at a place called Calvary shall produce worship for the countless ages of eternity. It springs from what happened on a tiny little bit of ground just outside the walls of Jerusalem. The incredible love of God shone through where man’s sin was seen at its starkest and most profound. Oh, those three hours of Calvary—what an incessant volume of praise they will evoke; yes, have already evoked and will go on evoking from a million of million hearts throughout all eternity to the praise of God.
Our marvellous Christ shall sit then, as he sits now, on the throne of the universe, and all in heaven and all on earth shall sing the praise of God under the baton sway of this divine conductor. All shall live lives of praise to God, as the blessed man Jesus Christ God’s Son sits on the throne of the Lord organizing all his myriads of subjects in heaven and on earth, and makes it all one glorious orchestra of praise to God.
Lessons from Israel’s past
That is the philosophy of history. But while there were these positive stages forward, I want finally to direct your attention to the fact that just as progress was made, so from time to time lapses occurred. You will perceive that the pattern of 1 Chronicles involves going up in progress, and then a lapse; going up again to a higher point, and then a lapse; higher again, and a lapse. Then at last, thank God, you come to the pinnacle, which was the reign of Solomon. It was a reign of peace and plenty and joy and gladness, and the building of that temple for which David had so magnificently prepared.
The story of 2 Chronicles then tells of the decline from that pinnacle. Solomon was a master of wisdom. His reign was full of peace and his head was full of wise sayings, but he wasn’t the Messiah. It was a glad day when they built the temple in Jerusalem City and shouted for joy, but it wasn’t heaven and it wasn’t the millennium; it was only a prototype. And Israel gradually declined from that high plateau of achievement.
Second Chronicles follows the same pattern as 1 Chronicles. There was a long decline, then a recovery under Joash; followed by a long decline and a recovery under Hezekiah; followed by a decline again and a recovery under Josiah; and then a desperate decline until they were all taken to Babylon; and a recovery again under Cyrus. Oh, it’s a book of ups and downs, but the last down is an up; and the last book of the Hebrew canon ends on a note of hope.
‘Human history thus far saw the vision,’ says the Chronicler. ‘It reached a peak, but it declined from it. Never mind, it was only a prototype, and what men dreamed of and accomplished lives on in the hearts and minds of God’s people as they wait for the coming of Christ, who shall give it permanent, eternal and infinite fulfilment.’
We’re going to look now at various people who made mistakes in the five stages recorded in the first book of Chronicles. They made progress but then they fell back. It won’t be as dreary as you fear, but we’re going to look at them anyway, dreary or not!
King Saul: 1 Chronicles 10
In the first stage, the big mistake was King Saul and his disobedience to God’s authority.
And you say, ‘Who was Saul, and what was wrong with him?’
Well, God had the intention of bringing in a king to be sovereign over his people, who should one day sit upon the very throne of the Lord. But the chronicler notes:
So Saul died for his breach of faith. He broke faith with the LORD in that he did not keep the command of the LORD, and also consulted a medium, seeking guidance. (1 Chr 10:13)
Saul was raised to kingship, but he took it upon himself to disobey the very God who had made him king, and he had to be deposed. He didn’t keep the word of the Lord; he got uppish and thought that now he was king he didn’t have to obey God anymore. But God wasn’t long in deciding what to do with Saul. God is prepared to see man as his viceroy on the throne of the universe, but on the condition that he obeys the divine will and the divine word.
That is precisely the chaos of our little world at the moment. Man, the son of Adam, has rebelled against his creator. He wants to rule but not to obey, and with a million people all wanting to disobey, the world is reduced to chaos.
I want to write over this first stage of 1 Chronicles this little heading: Man shall sit upon the throne of the Lord—by whose authority? Not his own authority, but by the authority of God and the authority of his word. Therefore, when Saul disobeyed he had to be dismissed.
What a story of the human race that is, isn’t it? The first man was a failure, a disobedient rebel. Now see God’s determination that, when the first king fell, God had another who should fulfil all his will, and he took the kingdom from Saul and gave it to David. The Christian message that I preach to you, therefore, is that man, the son of Adam, rebelled against God and had to be dismissed, but God went on with his programme. God is determined to have a man on the throne of the Lord, and at last God found a man who would obey his word utterly and implicitly, whatever it cost—‘And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross’ (Phil 2:8). And with his obedience to the word of God thus demonstrated, God has taken him to the very throne of the universe.
And listen—‘And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him’ (Heb 5:9). Would you want to have a part in this great vision and sit with Christ on his throne as he sits today on his Father’s throne? Would you like to reign with Christ? Do you hope to be there when Christ comes to his coronation and takes over this world and the whole universe, and actively reigns for God? If you want to have a part in his government, then listen to the terms. Christ obeyed and is now raised to that throne and has become the author of eternal salvation to those who obey him. Isn’t that a characteristic of Christians? True Christians can be described as believers, and they can be described likewise as those who obey him. How are we getting on in the programme that’s going to fit us to reign with Christ? How are our lessons in obedience going?
Uzzah: 1 Chronicles 13
In the second stage, the big mistake was Uzzah, and my heading this time is: Man shall sit on the throne of the Lord—by whose power? Not merely according to God’s authority, but by his power.
Our lesson is taken from an incident when, having taken Jerusalem City, David was determined to bring up the ark and put it in Jerusalem. The ark was the symbol of the presence of God, and he wanted the presence of God in his city to guard him from his enemies and to keep the people subject to him. So he instructed them to bring up the ark of the Lord.
God had given very strict instructions about that ark. It had to be carried in a very special way so that the Israelites should not fall into idolatrous conceptions of God, like the heathen who carried their idols around the place. But on this occasion David didn’t observe the instructions God had given him. In his keenness to bring it up, he had them put the ark on a new cart. He meant no disrespect; it was a brand-new cart. But as the oxen were drawing this cart along the road with the ark of God upon it, the oxen stumbled a bit and one of the men standing by instinctively put out his hand to steady the ark, and immediately God struck him and killed him.
You say, ‘That’s a very severe thing to do, isn’t it?’.
It seems so at first sight. The man meant to hold up the ark—hold up the throne of God. He meant well, so why did God execute him for that action so well meant?
Well, I turn aside for a moment. If one of these days you get home to heaven and near enough to see the real throne of God, if you see it begin to totter as though it were going to fall over, I urge you not to try and hold it up. Run as hard as you can, for if God falls over you’ll never hold him up. And if his throne starts to collapse, it will crush you if you don’t get out of the way. You’ll never keep it up.
The essence of idolatry is that people carry their gods. That is idolatry. In the end, they manipulate and control the god by their sacrifices, and they carry the god or its image. The world is full of that concept of people manipulating their gods. But you don’t manipulate the God of heaven; you can’t carry the God of heaven. You don’t have to keep him up so that he doesn’t fall over. His throne is never in any danger of falling over. If it were, you couldn’t keep it up. And for our own benefit we need to be taught that we don’t have to keep God up; we don’t have to keep his throne up. It’s the other way round: he keeps us up.
Man shall sit upon the throne of the Lord—by whose power? By God’s power, not man’s power. That’s why the gospel preacher doesn’t have to ask you to pull up your spiritual socks to be saved. He can preach you a gospel in which God does the saving; God does the redeeming; God does the rescuing and God does the maintaining. It is God’s power, and it is a gift. When we have become Christians, we need to remember that.
Sometimes we say to ourselves, ‘We need the power of God in our meetings of the church,’ and we set about getting it. And before we know where we are, we’re trying to manufacture or produce the power of God, but it can’t be done. You can produce a lot of excitement, but you’ll never produce the power of God. You can work up a lot of emotion, but emotion is not necessarily the power of God. The genuine power of God cannot be worked up. It doesn’t have to be. To those who are simple enough to rest upon God, God will demonstrate his power to them and lift them up.
Man shall sit upon the throne of the Lord—shall we indeed? I do need to be sure of it. And by what power shall I sit there? If it’s by my own efforts, I might well tumble off. I shall sit upon the throne of the Lord by the power of God.
David
1. His plan to build the temple: 1 Chronicles 17
In the third stage, the big mistake was this. David eventually brought up the ark of God, and being very pleased with himself he hit upon an idea that he would build God a temple in Jerusalem. He suggested to Nathan the prophet that perhaps he would like to tell the Almighty and see if he could possibly consider it. My heading here is: Man shall sit upon the throne of God—by whose plan?
But that same night the word of the LORD came to Nathan:
Go and tell my servant David, ‘Thus says the LORD: It is not you who will build me a house to dwell in. . . . I declare to you that the LORD will build you a house . . .’ (see 17:1–15).
‘David, I don’t want a temple at this stage. It’s nice of you to suggest it, but did I ever ask for one? Actually, one of these days I am going to have a temple, but you’re not going to be the one to build it. I’m not ready for it yet. You see, David, we’ve not arrived.’
David thought they had arrived. All these centuries God’s ark had been moved about in a portable tabernacle. Israel had been conquering the land, century after century making more progress, and the ark had followed them from place to place. David had come to the point where he thought, ‘You know, we’ve had so many victories that I think we’ve arrived and can afford to build a permanent temple to put the ark in and take the staves out.’
God said, ‘I’m sorry, David, you haven’t arrived yet. There’s still a lot of journeying and a lot of fighting to do. We shan’t have a temple until we have arrived.’
David meant well, but he had to be taught this lesson, Man shall sit upon the throne of the Lord—by whose plan? David’s plan or God’s plan? And the answer, of course, is God’s plan.
I didn’t invent salvation, and you will perceive that if I had it would have said, ‘Yes, please’ to forgiveness of sins, and then a comfortable house (perhaps a bungalow), a Mercedes, enough money to buy food to eat and a few pleasures; and then being let in the door of heaven to have a repeat programme, only one that is rather more exalted.
And you say, ‘Yes, Gooding, if that’s just about the biggest thing you can think of, anyone can see that you didn’t invent the plan of salvation’.
God’s idea of salvation is not merely to pardon me and give me forgiveness of sins, with some little seat inside the door of heaven to see the orchestra. God’s plan of salvation for me is nothing less than for me to sit upon the very throne of the Lord. Who would ever have conceived of such a staggering thing? But it’s God’s plan, and he’s not going to give it up. Nor is he going to let us settle down until he’s got us where he wants us to be.
I don’t know about you, but I have to confess that my heart sometimes wants to settle down before it’s reached home. It happens to folks, doesn’t it? They get saved in their teens, they go on with the Lord, and then somehow they think they’ve arrived or something. So they think there’s no need for any further progress, and they don’t come to the prayer meeting or to the ministry meeting. They don’t read their Bibles much, and they don’t pray much. They say to themselves, ‘I’m saved and I’ve made it good in life. I’ve got all I need, and I’ve arrived.’ Oh, what tiny concepts they have of God’s purpose for their lives! Thank God it’s not left to them to control the plan.
It’s God’s plan, my brothers and sisters, and for that reason you’ll have to be prepared for God to nudge you now and again and say, ‘Look here, this is not your resting place; you’ve not arrived yet. You must get up and go on.’ God’s plans are so big that it will account for some of the trials and difficulties of life that we go through. For it will take the whole of life and some very vigorous disciplines to prepare us, his redeemed people, to sit at last upon the throne of the Lord. And God will not allow himself or us to rest until his plan is fulfilled.
He numbers the people: 1 Chronicles 21
The fourth stage tells us of a very sorry incident in David’s life when he got near the end and the great plan was within sight of being achieved. Then David sinned when he commanded his officers to number the people. My heading over this stage is: Man shall sit on the throne of God—for whose glory?
Joab said to David, ‘But David, why do you want to number the people? Why do you want to know their number?’ (see v. 3).
Yes, why? The answer was that David wanted to know so that he could stick his chest out a bit. He was the man who had won the victories; he had organized it all. Look at all these folks who were obeying him and were his servants. ‘But God was displeased with this thing, and he struck Israel’ (v. 7).
You say, ‘What was wrong with it?’
But this sin is so devilish that it is fit only to be compared with what Satan himself did. It is to take the sacred thing that belongs to God and only God, and pervert it for your own glory. Man was made to serve God and to give his heart’s devotion to God. In this sad moment, David took the devotion of his people and their very lives for his own glory, pride and pleasure.
That is a more serious sin than murder, you know. But Christian preachers galore have been guilty of it, and I have likewise. Preaching the very word to attract glory to oneself instead of devotion to God; preaching the very gospel to draw men to loyalty to oneself and to one’s own denomination rather than to God. To steal the glory that belongs to God—that is a devilish thing to do. When at last the vast multitudes of heaven and earth bow down to Jesus Christ our Lord and pay him divine honours, the Bible adds that they shall do it ‘to the glory of God the Father’ (Phil 2:9–11).
3. He prepares for the building of the temple: 1 Chronicles 29
In the fifth stage, in the last chapter of 1 Chronicles David surveys his life’s handiwork. There are people organized in readiness, so that when the age of peace dawns they shall be ready to take their part. He’s trained the singers, the pastry cooks, the incense makers, the trumpeters. He’s collected the nails, the bolts, the wood, the stone. He’s made all the preparations of men and material; it merely waits now for the dawning of the age of peace. But who shall pay for it? My heading over this is: Man shall sit on the throne of God—at whose expense?
What a thing it will be as the bits and pieces are put together into one magnificent temple and the people take their place, all prepared and ready to sound the praise of God. And as each of them catches their own glimpse of God in all the wonder and glory of it, they will translate it into their own activity—making incense, blowing bugles, playing harps, building temples, be it what it will—and spring back in praise and gladsome activity to the glory of God. That’s the scheme. So David reflects upon all this treasure that he’s prepared, ready for the dawning of that great age.
And then he says to himself, ‘Where did I get all this from? I’ve given God all this, but it’s his own that he’s given me.’
But who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able thus to offer willingly? For all things come from you, and of your own have we given you. (29:14)
Passing by David, I think of our responsibility. May I ask you what you’re doing with your life? What is life about?
Oh, you marvellously privileged man who are an elder of a church and allowed to go and seek human material. You pray over it, teach it, polish it, refine it and guide it, ready for the dawning of that great day when God shall erect his heavenly temple.
Oh, you Sunday school teacher, what a priceless opportunity you have of going out and winning the heart of that eternal personality; winning that child for Christ, ready to be built into that eternal temple.
Oh, you businessman, how fantastically wealthy you are. What an opportunity you have—not to make money so that you just beat all the others, but to devote your whole business as a means of winning souls and training people in righteousness, responsibility and truth, preparing them in the day-to-day running of life for the part they must play in that eternity of peace, should God bring them to salvation.
What a fantastically wealthy thing it is to be allowed to take part with God in the preparation and training of human material for that coming great day, and for God to let you put your hand to the job. What are any of us apart from God’s forgiveness, but miserable bankrupt sinners who should have perished in hell forever? And then God in his mercy gives us the power of his Spirit and his holy word. He gives us life and breath, time and money, our homes, cars and all that we have.
Why do you think he gives it to us? It’s so that whatever we receive from him, we may in turn use it for the preparation of the building of that great, glorious temple of God that shall be erected in the new Jerusalem, capital of the universe, city of the King, when Christ comes again. The centre point shall be the temple of God and Christ ruling there with his redeemed people over a new heaven and a new earth.
Man shall sit upon the throne of the Lord—at whose expense? I’ll leave you with that question, for when you have plumbed the value of the blood of Calvary, you will have measured the expense God has paid to achieve that eternal glory for us.
Shall we pray.
O Lord, we thank thee for these ancient visions. We pray thou wilt enlarge our minds to think solidly and hard about them, that we may catch the understanding of it and then something of the joy of it in our hearts, so that our imaginations may be enriched and provoked to start imagining what that glorious world would be like, so that the opportunities in this life to prepare for it may not go past us unused. God give us the grace and stickability, we beseech thee, having seen the vision to take everything thou hast given us and use it for this glorious and sublime purpose: the preparation for the coming reign of Christ. We ask it for his name’s sake. Amen.
7. Zechariah
In the eighth month, in the second year of Darius, the word of the LORD came to the prophet Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, son of Iddo, saying, ‘The LORD was very angry with your fathers. Therefore say to them, Thus declares the LORD of hosts: Return to me, says the LORD of hosts, and I will return to you, says the LORD of hosts. Do not be like your fathers, to whom the former prophets cried out, “Thus says the LORD of hosts, Return from your evil ways and from your evil deeds.” But they did not hear or pay attention to me, declares the LORD. Your fathers, where are they? And the prophets, do they live for ever? But my words and my statutes, which I commanded my servants the prophets, did they not overtake your fathers? So they repented and said, As the LORD of hosts purposed to deal with us for our ways and deeds, so has he dealt with us.’ (Zech 1:1–6)
May God give us good understanding of his word.
Introduction
The three major periods in Israel’s history
The prophet Zechariah is one of the so-called Minor Prophets. In the Hebrew canon his book stands in the second division of the Old Testament, unlike the book of Chronicles, which stands in the third division; yet Zechariah carries the story on beyond the point that we were considering last evening. He ministered to the nation when they had returned from exile in Babylon and were endeavouring to rebuild Jerusalem City and the temple of the Lord at Jerusalem. So he stands in the last period that we call the postexilic period, which is in fact the third major part of ancient Israel’s history. I want to impress on our minds, then, that in the times before Christ there were three major periods of Israel’s history, and Zechariah came in the third of them.
Just turn over to the Gospel by Matthew and we’ll see those three major periods, from the beginning of the nation in Abraham until the coming of the Messiah, our Lord Jesus Christ. Matthew 1 begins, ‘The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham’ (v. 1). It then goes through the genealogy of our Lord and divides it into three parts. Look at verse 17:
So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ fourteen generations.
Actually, if you compare this record with that of Chronicles there may have been more than fourteen generations in some of those periods. Matthew knew that of course, but in the kind of language that the literary men of his day spoke, he is making the point to you that there are three major divisions of Israel’s history up until the coming of Christ. That is so chronologically; but there is something more important than chronology.
Those divisions of Israelite history were three major periods of preparation for the coming of the Messiah. When Adam sinned, God didn’t send his Messiah into the world immediately; nor did he send him into the world immediately after he chose Abraham and began the Jewish nation. God spent centuries preparing the way for the coming of the Messiah, and there were three major parts to that preparation.
First of all, people’s minds had to be prepared for what is meant by a messiah, so that they should be ready for him when he came. Look at the first period for instance, from Abraham to David. For all those long centuries they were expecting the coming of Abraham’s seed, and when Isaac was born I suspect Abraham cuddled the little chap in his arms, thinking, ‘This is the seed; this is the Messiah’. But Isaac was only a prototype. Similarly, when Moses was born, the great captain of salvation, I suspect many thought, ‘Could this be the Messiah?’ But Moses was only a prototype.
At last, the great King David came. He was the first true king that Israel had, and they welcomed him as the Lord’s anointed, their longed-for Messiah. But he too was only a prototype. Good as he was, aren’t you glad that David didn’t turn out to be the real Messiah? David, a chap with a long six-foot spear, a sword or two in his belt and a rather primitive palace in Jerusalem, running around the place killing Moabites with a few troops behind him? He was a genuine prototype of the Messiah, however, and as you look at David you can see in him some ideas that will prepare your mind for the kind of thing that Christ himself would do on an infinitely bigger scale.
They’d come a long way when God had brought them as far as David, but not all the way. They needed two more periods of long experience before they were in any way ready to contemplate and conceive of what the Messiah should be like.
In the third great period, God allowed them to be taken off into exile in Babylon. They deserved it because of their sin, but it had a wonderful effect because it woke up these people, who had hitherto lived in that postage stamp-sized place called Israel, to the colossal great world empires that were around them. They began to see that the real Messiah would have to be able to cope with the problems of a vast world and two or three mighty great superpowers, and not just with the government of a little tiny state in Palestine.
God used these three major periods then, to train their minds and their concepts of what the Messiah must be. In addition to that, God had to train and prepare the nation itself to be ready for the coming of the Messiah. So just let’s think for a moment about some of the lessons they learned.
The first great period of Jewish history must have been very pleasant to live in; don’t you think? On the whole, it was all progress. Yes, there were some interludes of failure, but for the most part it must have been exciting. It was during that time that Abraham discovered the reality of God, justification by faith and justification by works. Then along came Joseph, who ruled the country of Egypt with God-given wisdom and solved its economic problems.
Yes, after that there was a sorry interlude of slavery, but with Moses the nation went up and up and up again, culminating in the experience of God as their redeemer. There were those glorious moments in the wilderness when they discovered the tabernacle and all the wonder of entering into the presence of God to enjoy the fabulous richness of fellowship with him. They were exciting days when they actually arrived at Canaan and had an inheritance to get hold of. There was the exhilaration of fighting for it and conquering Ammonites, Moabites, Midianites and the rest, and at last possessing their inheritance—their milk and honey, their cows and their grass.
And then, to cap it all, the idea of a king who could fight giants that were ever so big, and bring them at last to rest peacefully in the splendour of Solomon’s empire, free and secure at the head of the nations. Oh, what days of progress they were!
Did I hear you say, ‘But you’re enthusing about the Jews; why don’t you enthuse about us? We’ve known periods like that.’
Have you? Oh, I hope you have. Can some of you who now have grey hair remember the glory it was to discover justification by faith? (I hope you have discovered it.) Then the wonder of the likes of Joseph, the exodus and the Passover lamb, and being redeemed by the blood of Christ, knowing what it is to set forward on the Christian pilgrimage towards your inheritance. Oh, weren’t they glorious days when you first discovered that?
And then you discovered the tabernacle. If you didn’t, you ought to have! All the wonder of being able to enter into the holiest of all—not now into a little shrine in the desert, but into the great heavenly tabernacle, right into the presence of God—and your heart exulted when you discovered that wonderful right of having fellowship with God. And in your younger days, as you came across old enemies that were keeping you back from your inheritance, the thrill it was by God’s help and grace to be delivered and gain the victory, and to enter into the joy of your inheritance as spoken of in Ephesians and Colossians and other places in the New Testament. You found that you were looking forward to the coming of the Christ, David’s greater Son. They were great days, when, like Israel, you first discovered the hope of a coming Messiah and the thought that he might be here any day.
May God help you just for a moment to reminisce and go back to the days when you first discovered all that, and you’ll get some idea of how Israel felt. You thought you were nearly ready for heaven, didn’t you? If you’d died then, it would be straight to glory, and you felt very well prepared.
And then? Ah, well, with Israel there came another period after that when they didn’t do quite so well. I suppose they got middle-aged. I don’t know what it is, but I tell you that funny things can happen when you start getting middle-aged; and do remember that some of you will be middle-aged before you think. Somehow, imperceptibly perhaps, Israel began to go downhill, and they slipped and they slid and they slithered. They got the impression they’d seen it all in Solomon, and now they began to wrangle and compromise with the enemy. They went from bad to worse until they got all confused with the Gentiles and paganism and idolatry. They got away from God, as far down as it is possible for a nation to go, until God had to send them into exile, down to Babylon.
I hope you never have a period like that in your life. But I suspect there might be one or two middle-aged people here tonight who would say, ‘Yes, Mr Preacher, truth to tell, I’ve known those days when I lost the enthusiasm of my Christian beginnings, when the truth of God that once thrilled me no longer thrilled me, and I got out into the world and began to compromise here and compromise there. Things slipped and I got myself into a muddle.’ Who of us in middle life hasn’t slid and gone downhill somewhat? Well, if I’m speaking to anybody like that tonight, may I urge you to notice that, by God’s magnificent generosity, there was a third period for Israel.
What is the gospel message according to Zechariah?
In spite of her privileges, Israel had slipped, gone downhill and into exile, but they knew a period of recovery. We’re interested in it tonight because Zechariah and his fellow postexilic prophets fit into that third period. He was a prophet sent by God’s grace to the people to revive the backslider, bring Israel back, give them new impetus, new hope and new vision to carry on until the Messiah came.
Note it well, for, like the rest of God’s book, it is a gospel message, and this is the gospel of return, of recovery, of starting again and of redemption from backsliding. Should I be speaking to anyone who feels that they’ve lost so much of youth-time experience and gone too far, come back, my dear good friend. Please notice in God’s word that what he did with Israel he can do with you. Let’s remember that he is a God of new beginnings, of coming back, restoration, new hope and starting afresh.
Israel’s periods of recovery—historic and future
Now that we’ve put Zechariah into his slot, so to speak, let’s think about this great period of recovery. But just before we go back to the prophecy of Zechariah, would you mind looking at verses 12–16 of Matthew 1 again? Those fourteen generations cover the period of recovery, and I would ask you to notice that it was a period. That is to say, when Israel in exile repented of their sin and sought God again, it didn’t mean that the recovery was one hundred per cent complete overnight. Recovery was a period to be worked at, to be prayed over, to be exercised about, and to make progress in difficult circumstances.
My dear good brothers and sisters, if you have wandered you’ll know what I mean. It’s marvellous to repent and come back to the Lord, and he’s prepared to receive you at once. But coming back can be difficult. Sorting out the complications and making up for lost time can sometimes be a more difficult thing than starting Christianity, can’t it? But it’s worth doing.
Notice that there was no magic or sudden coming back to the high point for Israel, but a period of recovery. It was at the early part of that period, when the people had begun to recover, that Zechariah ministered. Because of their difficulties, they were slackening off. They had very big difficulties, and Zechariah was sent by God to encourage them to persevere. God gave him visions of the future glory to nerve and exhilarate them, and give them the enthusiasm to go onwards with God in the path of recovery.
Then, as I say, if all had gone well, Israel’s recovery would have been one period; but alas, man being what man is, it didn’t go as well as it ought to have gone. There was so much that was undesirable, that when the Messiah eventually came Israel rejected him. They scarcely recognized him, and therefore the whole process had to be repeated again.
For centuries now, because of her rejection of her Messiah, Israel has wandered among the Gentiles. But if you read Zechariah’s prophecy carefully, you will discover that, while he was ministering in that first period of recovery, he is made aware by God’s Holy Spirit that when the Messiah came the nation would reject him, and therefore there would have to be another period of discipline and another period of exile. Only at the end of further unnamed centuries of discipline will the Messiah come again and the nation’s recovery shall be one hundred per cent complete.
Now that is very interesting because, when we look at the first period of recovery during which Zechariah was ministering, we shall find that in many particulars it strongly resembles that great period of recovery for Israel in the future that shall lead up to the second coming of Christ; just as the first period of recovery led to his first coming.
Let me sketch in for you Israel’s situation in the land during the first period of recovery. When they came back from exile in Babylon, it was in dribs and drabs—a group here, a group there. Under Ezra and Nehemiah, they came back under their own steam and a small group of people started to work at rebuilding their temple and city. But then, you see, in those days there were lots of little nations around Israel’s land, and when they saw what Israel was doing, they started yapping like dogs at Israel’s heels. And not content with that, they did their very best to get Persia, the big world superpower at the time, to stop Israel from rebuilding the city and the temple. So from time to time life was made difficult for them, but then eventually the world’s superpower allowed them to start rebuilding again.
If you have taken in that situation, I suspect you can’t forget what is happening now. Israel has been in exile for centuries—eighteen or nineteen hundred years—but now they are back again in their land. The Messiah hasn’t come yet, of course, but Israel is back in the land, and precisely what happened then is happening now. The little nations around Israel are yapping loudly at Israel’s heels and calling on the United Nations to stop them. History has a way of repeating itself, doesn’t it?
Perhaps you’d like to see it in black and white in the New Testament, but let’s look first of all at Zechariah 4, which records a vision about the restoration of the temple in Jerusalem. How could they go on with rebuilding their temple when the great power and the little powers were so much against them? Zechariah and Zerubbabel were given the vision of the lampstand, with two olive trees miraculously supplying it with a constant supply of oil so that the testimony of that lampstand is maintained. The interpretation of the vision is given: ‘Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts’ (v. 6). So Zerubbabel was encouraged in his day to go ahead with rebuilding the temple to maintain a testimony for God in Israel, in spite of the little nations around and often in spite of the major world power.
If you turn now to Revelation 11, you will see a prophecy of a situation that is yet to be. The vision that was given to John is in almost identical terms to the vision that was given to Zechariah and Zerubbabel.
‘Rise and measure the temple of God and the altar and those who worship there, but do not measure the court outside the temple; leave that out, for it is given over to the nations, and they will trample the holy city for forty-two months. And I will grant authority to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth.’ These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth. (vv. 1–4)
You will see that the very terms are borrowed from Zechariah’s vision in chapter 4, because what happened in Zechariah’s day will happen again. In spite of Gentile opposition, the Jews shall erect and maintain a testimony in Jerusalem City to the God of heaven. In the period leading up to the coming of Christ in power and great glory, God will miraculously maintain a testimony for himself in Jerusalem City.
The great world powers of the time and the coming dictator, the man of sin, will try to banish the very concept of God. In spite of his devilish trio, God shall miraculously maintain by his Spirit a witness to the reality of the God of heaven in Jerusalem City. Antichrist, the man of sin, shall rage and ‘oppose and exalt himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God’ (see 2 Thess 2:4). Yet, for months on end, God will miraculously maintain his two witnesses in that city by the same secret as he maintained Zerubbabel and the temple in the period of the first restoration. We are given these prophecies so that we might take note of what God’s programme is for the maintenance of his testimony in that coming period. More than that I’m not going to say; I leave that to you.
What is true recovery?
Let me turn now to concentrate on some of the important elements in the matter of recovery. First of all, I want to point out to you what we read in the first paragraph of Zechariah: ‘Return to me, says the LORD of hosts, and I will return to you’ (1:3). Seeing the Jews now restored to their land, many of God’s holy people clap their hands for joy. But they’re making a little bit of a mistake, aren’t they? Or perhaps a very big mistake.
The other year, I was in a Christian church, an assembly in Nazareth. It is largely composed of Arabic-speaking Christians. They are gracious men and women who are keen for God and his gospel, worthily working in the little narrow souks of Nazareth, seeking out the lost and preaching the gospel. I asked one of the Arabs, ‘How do the Jewish authorities treat you?’. He said, ‘They treat us very well because we teach Arabs to love Jews’. And I saw evidence of it as Arabs and Jews sat down together at the Lord’s Supper. It was a marvellous sight! There’s only one thing that can teach Arabs to really love Jews, and, if you please, Jews to love Arabs, and that’s the Christian gospel. If you come to Ireland, you will actually see Englishmen and Irishmen sitting down together at the Lord’s Supper. That doesn’t get advertised in the press, but the gospel does have that effect. Converted Roman Catholics and converted Protestants (for both lots need to be converted) sit down together at the Lord’s Supper. There’s only one thing that will do it; and that’s not politics but Christ. But my Arab friend, who interpreted for me as I preached, confessed to me privately that life can sometimes become a little bit difficult when starry-eyed Christians come to Nazareth and preach, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that the Jews are restored to their land. Hip hip hooray, and hallelujah!’. It is a little bit difficult for Christian Arabs to take, as the same Jews have stolen some of their property.
Just the fact that Israel is back in their land doesn’t mean they’re back with God. They made that mistake in Zechariah’s day. They thought of return simply in the sense of geographical return—getting back from Babylon physically to the land of Israel; back from being strangers and exiles in somebody else’s land to being in their own land and masters of their own place. They thought it was enough, and that was all there was to it. But that’s not God’s idea of return. God’s idea was a moral and spiritual return.
The prophet Zechariah plays on the word return because one of the words for return in Hebrew is also the word you would use for repentance. The Jews returned in the physical sense, but alas so many of them didn’t return in the spiritual sense of repentance. What does it mean to return? What is meant by recovery? It means to return spiritually and morally. And not until there has been a genuine spiritual and moral return will they ever reach the age of bliss and the reign of the Messiah that they all look forward to so much.
Four facets of recovery
So let us briefly trace this idea through the four sections of the prophecy. Each of them emphasizes the fact that true return and true recovery are primarily moral and spiritual.
| Part one | 1:1–6:15 | The return of God’s presence |
| Part two | 7:1–8:23 | A people stamped with God’s character |
| Part three | 9:1–11:17 | Servant leadership |
| Part four | 12:1–14:21 | Complete recovery ushered in by the second coming of Christ |
Part one (1:1–6:15)
Within this first section, the great central passage about the return is to be found at the end of chapter 1 and throughout chapter 2. What is it about? Return in what sense?
Sing and rejoice, O daughter of Zion, for behold, I come and I will dwell in your midst, declares the LORD. (2:10)
Therefore, thus says the LORD, I have returned to Jerusalem with mercy; my house shall be built in it, declares the LORD of hosts, and the measuring line shall be stretched out over Jerusalem. (1:16)
The first thing about any genuine return is the return of the Lord—the return of the presence of the Lord amongst his people in his temple in Jerusalem. What use would a return be without that? A return to the land physically without a sense of the presence of God, what a disappointing, frustrating, empty and arid thing it would be. The first great gospel of return is that God is willing to return and dwell amongst his people. Therefore he exhorts and shows the people what provision he is making so that they shall be fitted for the return of the presence of God.
I wonder if I might turn aside again. I’m supposed to be lecturing but I can’t forbear sermonizing from time to time. If you have ever wandered from the Lord and come back again, what has been the chief joy of your coming back? I guarantee that it is the sense of the Lord’s presence in your heart. What a sad thing it is for a believer who has once known an active, real and practical sense of the presence of the Lord in their life, and then gone slipping and sliding back. Those dreary arid years, when you seemed to walk alone and the presence of God felt far off. Oh, how sad are those lost years. Then there comes a stirring to make a true return and the possibility of once more enjoying the presence of God and the Saviour walking with you. It’s not that he ever abandons a true believer; but if we persist in sinful ways and grieve God’s Holy Spirit we shall not know much of enjoying his presence, shall we? But there is a way of return, and it starts by opening the heart and saying in repentance, ‘Lord, I come back to you. Lord, please come back to me’.
That’s the beginning of return, isn’t it? Not waiting until you are improved and then the Lord coming; but the Lord coming right now so that he might dwell among you and guide those difficult lessons that lie in front of those who come back and seriously want to recapture and progress further. So that he might come back among his people, listen to his provision as given in chapters 3 and 4.
In chapter 3, there is the story of Joshua the high priest as he stood in the presence of the Lord. Having returned to Jerusalem and representing his people, Joshua is standing there in his filthy old rags—a fit representation of Israel, for they were all filthy. But as he stood in the presence of the Lord, he found that the Lord was prepared to accept him as he was to re-clothe, cleanse and rehabilitate him. For the believer who comes back, the moment he repents—like a prodigal coming back to the father—the father will put his hands round his neck and kiss him (Luke 15:20). Oh, how wonderful that is! In the presence of God, he has a high priest. Not now a miserable Joshua as sinful and dirty as we are ourselves, but a high priest who is impeccable, who stands with the Father and pleads our cause. All the while we were slipping and sliding, he has been praying for us that our faith will not fail; at last prevailing and bringing us back, and prepared to go on praying to maintain us with God.
Oh, the gospel of return that there is in a God who has provided not a failing Joshua but his impeccable Son as our representative to bring us through. ‘Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them’ (Heb 7:25 KJV). Remember when poor old Peter was about to backslide, our Lord said to him, ‘Peter, I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail’. And then he added, not, ‘and if you ever turn back again,’ but, ‘when you have turned back again’ (see Luke 22:32). The great high priest was going to pray him through and bring him back, as he will for every genuine believer.
In chapter 4, there is the vision given to Zechariah for Zerubbabel, which we have touched upon. Not only the vision of the high priest who was accepted on behalf of the people, but the vision of the power of God’s Holy Spirit to maintain these folks in their testimony for the Lord, even in those difficult and broken days.
Do you feel a little bit ashamed? You say, ‘How can I ever stand again? I blotted my copybook in my office. They’ve known me in my backslidden days. How can I stand now?’
Well, how could the Jews stand when everybody knew that they had sinned against God? They’d been thrown out and taken down to Babylon, and now they were coming back so feeble and weak. They were the mockery of Tobiah the Ammonite and company (see Neh 4:3). Yet at this stage God graciously comes to them and says, ‘Listen, it’s not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit. I can make you stand; I can maintain your testimony; I can cause you to recover.’ It led, of course, to sundry purges of all sorts, but I must leave you to read about them. What a gospel it is, isn’t it? With a priest in heaven and the Holy Spirit on earth, there is ample provision for all who want to come back and return.
Part two (7:1–8:23)
This second great section of the book likewise deals with recovery. Not now merely with the fact that the Lord is coming back, but with the character that Jerusalem has got to have in the period of recovery.
Thus saith the LORD; I am returned unto Zion, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem: and Jerusalem shall be called a city of truth; and the mountain of the LORD of hosts the holy mountain. . . . and I will be their God, in truth and in righteousness. (8:3, 8 KJV)
Recovery will mean the presence of God back in Jerusalem, but it’s also got to mean that Jerusalem is stamped with the character of the God who dwells in her. She’s got to come to be known among the nations as the city of truth, where the people deal righteously.
These are the things that you shall do: Speak the truth to one another; render in your gates judgements that are true and make for peace; . . . Therefore love truth and peace. (8:16, 19)
That’s God’s recipe for return. It isn’t always the politicians’ recipe, is it? They’ll tell you lies when everybody knows that they’re lies, but they believe it’s the adult thing to do. It’s only children who tell the truth, so they go on telling lies. International diplomacy is a seething hotbed of sheer lies, and they say it’s the adult thing to do. All right then, be it the adult thing, but it will never lead to paradise. You will never build paradise on lies; it will only increase international tension. It’s heartbreaking that men can build rockets to go to the moon, but they can’t tell the truth and rely upon each other.
My brothers and sisters, will you allow me to sermonize a bit more? Ephesians takes up the lesson of Zechariah: ‘And you, my dear Christians, please speak truth, every one with his neighbour—in your business, in your home, in your school’ (see Eph 4:25). That’s God’s programme for recovery, and we’ve got to be known as a people of truth and righteousness.
I once was preaching back in my country, and there happened to be a gentleman in the large congregation who sought me out the next day. I was preaching on Christ’s recovery of Peter and how Peter came back to the Lord. This gentleman of some sixty years of age sought me out to have lunch with me. He told me his story, and how last night had been the first meeting of Christians he’d been in for thirty years. How kind of God, when the man had been away from the Lord for thirty years, that at the very first meeting he came to the preacher, all innocently, should be talking about our Lord’s recovery of Peter, and how he welcomed him back to the fold. That dear Christian man was restored to the Lord that day.
But thirty years had been wasted. As a young man he was a great Christian preacher, but he went into business and was tempted to do a deal that was a bit shady. He pondered whether he should do it or not, but he said to himself, ‘Older Christian men do this kind of thing, so why shouldn’t I?’ There was a momentous consequence, and he went sliding down the slope. He became very prosperous, but he spent thirty years of life away from the Lord. It is important that we get hold of this matter in our day-to-day business and other relationships. God’s recipe for return is that we must be known as people of truth and righteousness.
Part three (9:1–11:17)
In the third great section of the book, the character of the king who shall bring in the great age of peace and plenty is discussed.
Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. (9:9)
Yes, he actually did come riding on a donkey into Jerusalem City, claiming to be her king (Matt 21:1–7). But they had no time for him; he wasn’t the kind of king they wanted. They had the concept that to rule was to get yourself a big position, get yourself a lot of perks, and then lord it over the people. So Caiaphas was high priest, Annas helped him, and they both made many a big penny out of it. Herod had wheedled round the Romans, got control of his part of the world, and he made a good thing out of it as well. That was the concept people had of ruling.
You’ll find Zechariah in chapter 11 complaining about it—how the shepherds, instead of feeding the flock, crushed them and fleeced them, and the big sheep pushed the others out of the way to get more grass for themselves. This was their idea of ruling: the boys who could get their hands on power feathered their own nests and crushed the others. They didn’t care for a Messiah who was meek and lowly; they valued him at thirty pieces of silver, says Zechariah (11:13), and threw him out (cf. Matt 27:3). Zechariah warned them that when they do that, they shall be in for a period of trouble. God will raise up the kind of shepherd that they want, and then they shall find out what he is really like (Zech 11:16). He’ll raise up the very antichrist, and if they won’t have the king who comes in God’s name, they shall have another kind of king. ‘If another comes in his own name, you will receive him’ (John 5:43). He will be a career boy after their own temperament, who will lead them into the most disastrous slavery that Israel has ever known, under the beast, the man of sin.
But it wasn’t merely Jewish politicians who had curious ideas about government. Just listen to a conversation among the apostles at the Lord’s Supper (Luke 22:24). Just imagine it: they’d just taken the bread and the wine, and here were these holy apostles arguing about who was to be regarded as the greatest, and they were all disputing and jockeying for a place in the kingdom. That’s what they thought the kingdom of God was going to be. It had started with John and James coming to Christ one day and asking him, ‘Would you give us what we want?’ (see Mark 10:35–45).
‘What do you want me to do for you?’, he asked.
‘Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.’
Said Christ, ‘Can you suffer like I suffer?’.
‘Oh yes, we’re prepared to pay the cost, but we would want the chief places in your kingdom.’
Well, you’ll never bring in paradise like that, will you? You won’t even create an assembly that’s worth calling an assembly like that. We’ve got enough leaders; we want some servants.
We want those who have learned that the way to rule is to get down at people’s feet and wash them. God’s programme for recovery is a king who is meek and lowly.
Part four (12:1–14:21)
And finally, in God’s programme for recovery there is the second coming of Christ, ending in the millennium—the great Feast of Tabernacles—when God shall wipe away tears from all faces, and make for the nations a feast of rich food (Zech 14:16; Isa 25:6–8). That’s the last great section of Zechariah, but even that won’t be magic, you know. For though Christ will come in great power and destroy Israel’s enemies, and ours as well, before the age of peace and plenty dawns Israel shall have to go through a period of chastisement. They must be brought to repentance and great sorrow of heart and mourning before God; ‘they shall look on him whom they pierced’ (see 12:10). God is waiting for the time of Israel’s repentance so that he can cleanse her and usher her into that period of complete recovery—that period of millennial bliss that he has designed for them and for all who love the Saviour.
May God bless our little thumbnail sketch of Zechariah and incite our curiosity and imagination to study more. Whether we have backslidden in the past, never have done so, or may do in the future, let’s lay hold of the great gospel that can save, recover and restore us if we backslide, and has power enough to present us at last blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy (Jude v. 24).
Shall we pray.
O God, we thank thee for this prophet, who was so full of joy and gladness at the possibilities of recovery. We pray, Lord, that thou will keep us from straying. But, in as much as we all stray from time to time, Lord, let us not wander for long, we beseech thee. Bring us back, Lord, by thy grace, lest we wander so far that severe disciplines are needed to bring us back. But, O God, however far we get away, give us that sense of thy love that gives us the courage to come back. Open our eyes to thy great provisions. We thank thee for the prospect of the Saviour’s coming to take us home. We thank thee for those further prospects of Israel’s eventual restoration. We thank thee that thy purposes shall be fulfilled and Christ shall yet come, and earth shall be full of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. As we think of those glorious times, blessed Lord Jesus, we raise our hearts to thee just in this moment, and we say, ‘Even so, come, Lord Jesus’, and may thy coming find us walking in thy love and fear and ready for thine appearing. We ask it for thy name’s sake. Amen.
Footnotes
1 In these studies, the term ‘man’ is used as the generic term for both men and women.
2 The Hebrew word is ādām.
3 The venue for these studies.
4 Probably Epimenides.
5 Pilgrim’s Progress, New York: G. H. McKibbin, 1899.