THE WATCHMAN’S CALL
David A Barlow
Isaiah 21: 11, 12
John 21: 19 (from “And having”) -22
Acts 8: 26-31 (to “guide me?”)
My impression for this occasion is the way, and being guided in the way. In this first scripture I want to take up the application that the “Watchman” would be the gospel preacher. You think of the world outside as it goes on in utter darkness. There is nothing, no hope in the world that rejected Christ, just utter darkness. I read just before coming out of the conversion of one hymn writer, William Cowper. As he was walking through a churchyard one night, while a sexton was digging a grave, his leg suddenly struck an object which turned out to be a human skull. It came to him then that whatever he tried to escape in this world, whatever he did, his end would still be this, emptiness and death. That is the reality; it is the portion of all in this life. There is nothing in this world, just darkness. Man does seek guidance; there is plenty of evidence for that. Ever since communication has expanded there seems to be an ever increasing number of options that would attract followers to this and that, the political scene has perhaps never been more complicated, and for those without a political mind you could look at idols such as celebrities or sports heroes; there is always something that man is seeking but really it is utter darkness.
However, God has seen that, throughout the course of this world, there has been a watchman. There have been those that are watching; that are looking. What are they looking for? The coming of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ. There are passages of Scripture which speak of His coming again; and the Lord tells His disciples what the signs will be before He comes in glory. Our eyes need to be lifted to look for His coming and be ready. He says, “I come quickly”, Rev 22: 7. In the meantime the preacher is here to be a watchman, to be ready for God, to be able to speak God’s word. Maybe the preacher is listening out for someone to say, “Watchman, what of the night?”. Maybe there is an exercised soul, realising the condition they are in as a needy, poor, lost sinner; realising that they have to do with a holy and righteous God; and seeing how far short they come. So the cry is, “what of the night?” - what hope is there? The watchman’s response is, “The morning cometh, and also the night”.
Today, the morning has come. Someone has endured everything that rightly should have fallen on me as a lost and needy sinner: the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. What a Saviour He is! The morning is here; resurrection morning. The Lord is the One who not only took on the sins that we have committed but also the guilt of sin, and the question of sin itself; how complete that is. A judge might be able to say that, although all of your sins have been proven and you clearly deserve condemnation, you may be let off nonetheless; that is the best this world could offer. With God, it is justification: the guilt has all gone as well. In a court system, as you were discharged, you would perhaps be thankful for that, but you would be right still to feel the weight and guilt of what you had committed. Not so with God; the Lord Himself has not only borne our sins, He has also born the guilt of them before a holy and righteous God. What God offers is justification by faith in that beloved One. What a gospel we have to announce.
What a morning; there was never a morning like this resurrection morning. God can come out; it speaks of it when the Lord went into death: “the veil of the temple was rent in two from the top to the bottom”, Matt 27: 51. It was not just that God would come out for some things, but He can come out fully in His blessing for mankind; “rent from the top to the bottom”. God’s full thoughts are made known. And what a morning it was when the Lord rose from the dead, “raised up from among the dead by the glory of the Father”, Rom 6: 4. He could say to His own, “I ascend to my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God”, John 20: 17.
What a gospel! The wonderful thing is that it may be yours by faith. May it never become commonplace to accept what the Lord did for His own on the cross, that He endured everything for us. He is now crowned with glory and honour;
Repentance only, God requires from man,
And faith in Christ, His well-beloved Son.
(Hymn 123)
Surely the “morning cometh”; the morning has come. The warning in the gospel is, “and also the night”. We do not know when the Lord will come to call His own, those who have been washed in His precious shed blood, to be with Himself forever, and the opportunity in the gospel will end. What that blood means to God; how precious it is, capable of cleansing from every sin. “The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin”, 1 John 1: 7. The One who is raised and crowned with glory and honour is coming again, but then the night. For the world here that will be it: no more warning, just the night. How important now is. You think of the apathy and indifference of man, but the night is coming; how terrible! Paul says, “Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord we persuade men”, 2 Cor 5: 11.
Do you know the Lord as your personal Saviour? The gospel appeal is still to you now; what a God we have to do with. He goes on to say, “if ye will inquire, inquire; return, come”. It says, “return”. If perhaps we have grown cold in our affections, the Lord is still the same. His heart is still towards you and He would call you to return, return to His fold, return to where His love pervades all. This world can get down on us and get upon us; if it cannot attract us it perhaps beats us down. The Lord, if we have grown cold in our affections, would call us to return, return to Him. He is ever available for us. Then it says, “Come”; if you have not come before, come now. Do not leave it, do not wait another moment; the night is coming, return and come. What an appeal there is in the gospel. All the preacher can do is point to Christ and say, ‘He is my all, and He can be your all too’. He has endured all the judgment for sins that rightly fell upon me. I love Him, and my desire is to present Him to you as the only Saviour for sinners. You can rely on nothing else; it is Christ alone: may He be magnified, may He be glorified. What a privilege it is for the gospel preacher to speak of the One who saved him and He can be presented as the One who can save anyone, anyone that will. ‘Whosoever will’, as we sometimes sing, Hymn 439.
The next scripture I read speaks of following the Lord. I wondered whether that might link a little with the way and being guided. We sung of there being only one way to salvation; ‘God’s blessed way of liberty’, and our footsteps should haste, Hymn 276. There is One to follow; and that is the Lord Jesus. You consider His path here and the idea is that you in your experience, and I in my experience, should follow Him. He is to be our Guide; we are to walk in His footsteps. I wonder whether we need to consider what it means to follow Jesus. He was rejected in this world. He says to His disciples, “Whosoever desires to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me”, Mark 8: 34. His call is to you and to me, and we are to follow Him and Him alone. We touched in the reading today about having affection for Him; and being His friend. May we be stimulated to have ever increasing affection for the One who has gone the whole way for us. We think of the experience of Peter, one who truly loved the Lord and had real affection for Him. He was willing to die for the Lord, or so he thought. How he must have felt it when he then denied the Lord; he “wept bitterly”, Matt 26: 75. Here the Lord in wonderful grace is restoring Peter and telling him, “Follow me”. Peter had just had a hard word. He had just been told that when he was old he would be taken where he would not desire. He had had a sense of knowing he would go a way that naturally he would not want. That was a hard word, maybe he felt that and he looked around maybe to deflect something of that. He looked at another brother and said, “what of this man?”. Sometimes I feel that temptation; I look around and see someone else, and I ask, ‘What about him, and how about him?’. The Lord’s word to each of us is, “what is it to thee? Follow thou me”. We are to have our eyes upon Him. It is not our own ideas of what it means to follow the Lord; it is just to follow Him in simplicity in love for Him and having our eyes upon Him. Our eyes lifted up to where He is in the glory, to follow Him. Peter and John did not have their own ideas as to what to do to follow Him. They did not go in different ways; their object was the same. When John wrote this Peter had already been martyred; he was already resting in the Lord. Was John on some sort of different path? No! He knew what it was to be on the island called Patmos for the testimony of Jesus, Rev 1: 9. They had both followed Jesus in their individual pathway, and they found a link together and they found fellowship together following Him: “Follow thou me”.
The pathway is hard, I am sure it is, but we are in a scene that has rejected Christ. We are to be different. We are to be lights in the world. We are to be a testimony in our pathway down here, and we are that by following the Lord. What a perfect Guide He is. The hymn writer says,
Lord, we love to trace Thy footprints
Here amidst the desert sand
Hymn 77.
Do we? Read the gospels and see the way the Lord moved in perfect blessed humility always answering to the will of His God and Father in His desire to follow Him, in love for Him. May this be a word for us, “Follow thou me”, may we all do that.
I wanted to link this third scripture to the work of the Holy Spirit. I have a lot of sympathy for this Ethiopian. You can picture the scene; he had had a long journey to come and worship at Jerusalem. The Lord says as to the woman in John 4, “Ye worship ye know not what”, v 22. The Ethiopian was coming to worship what he did not know. He had made an extremely long journey to worship at Jerusalem and he had gone away with a book, the prophet Isaiah, and he was reading it but it did not seem to be intelligible. There is mention of a number of nations in Isaiah but there is no mention as to the Ethiopians coming into blessing, and the part he had reached just did not make sense to him. He knew there was something there; he had read quite a bit of the book. If he had started the roll at the beginning, he had read up to what we know as chapter 53, and there were hints about somebody that maybe he had noticed. There is the reference to the Branch (Isa 11: 1); it speaks of “a man more precious than fine gold” (Isa 13: 12), and the man whose name is, “Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Father of Eternity, Prince of Peace”, Isa 9: 6. He had maybe noticed this; it did not seem to be intelligible; but he continued to search, and he knew he needed a guide. We need a guide, beloved hearers. What he did not yet know was that there was already a divine working in his precious soul. This man was going on his journey, reading this book, searching and not understanding, but the Spirit had gone before. He called Philip to draw alongside to open up the precious truths of the Bible to him; the precious truth concerning the Lord Jesus Christ. What a guide the Spirit is. He “searches all things, even the depths of God”, 1 Cor 2: 10. The Lord said of Him, “he shall guide you into all the truth”, John 16: 13.
Let us rely upon the Holy Spirit. We have been reminded that He has come to take control. He has come to take control of your life; He has come to take control of mine, and He would desire to open up in this wonderful book the truth concerning the Lord Jesus Christ. May we allow more room for Him to work, and may we let go the things of this world that ever increasingly distract and take up our time, so that the Spirit has an ever increasing opportunity to open up the precious truths, treasure in heaven, concerning the Lord Jesus Christ. What a blessing this Ethiopian man had! He was searching, he needed a guide and the Holy Spirit became His Guide. There came a point when he did not need Philip any longer “he went on his way rejoicing”. His eyes had been lifted to a Man in the glory and he was rejoicing. Truly then the Spirit was his guide. May we in our own simple way prove the experience of being guided here by the Holy Spirit, walk in the way that has been set on by the Lord Himself and be a testimony, be a watchman for the coming day. May it be the portion for all - what a gospel!
May the Lord bless the word.
West Norwood
13th May 2018