DIVINE PATIENCE
David A Brown
Genesis 44: 14
Luke 15: 20
Genesis 6: 3
I would like to say a little today about divine patience. We sang in the first verse of our hymn -
Jesus ready waits to save you,
Full of pity, love and power (Hymn 208)
That is the Lord Jesus. He is full of pity; He is full of love, and He is full of power. He is able and willing and waiting to save every sinner in this world, which means every man and woman and boy and girl. There may be about eight billion persons in this world and the blood of Christ is available and able to save every single soul for God. Again our hymn says, 'Open wide stands mercy's door'. How great is God's patience!
The dispensation in which these glad tidings are preached is not going on forever. It is nearly two thousand years since that wonderful moment when Christ rose from the dead, since Pentecost and the incoming of the Holy Spirit. Christ was given a place in heaven at God's right hand as a blessed Saviour, and from then until now God is appealing in grace to human hearts to believe on His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. There is a day coming soon when there will be no more proclamation of these glad tidings, no more open-air preachings as now, and this opportunity for mankind to come into soul blessing will be no more. This day of grace will finally close one day. I do not know when that day will be but I can tell you this much, it is nearer than when I first believed. God in His grace and goodness is maintaining the door – mercy's door, wide open; and while He waits persons who have not yet believed may come to Him. Maybe you are such a person, my friend?
Have you ever considered that? Someone will be the last person to enter through that door. If you do not know the Lord Jesus in your soul, if you do not know Him in the depth of your heart as your Saviour, I appeal to you simply tonight to believe through faith on the Lord Jesus Christ. Trust in Him and in His finished work. What a time we live in! It is a time of grace, a time of pity, love and power. What a world it will be and what a time it will be after every believer in the Lord Jesus has been taken from this earth and the Holy Spirit is here no more.
I thought of Joseph when I was thinking of this matter of patience and of these five words, “and he was still there”. Joseph is a type of the Lord Jesus and we use that expression 'a type' of the Lord Jesus although no one is sinless: only Christ. So a man like Joseph, despite his greatness, can only be a type. Joseph is similar to the Lord Jesus in what he underwent inasmuch as he was hated by his own brothers. The Lord Jesus was hated by His own brethren, as it says of Him, “He came to his own, and his own received him not”, John 1: 11. Joseph was cast by his brothers into a pit (which speaks of the death of the Lord Jesus Christ), and Joseph was taken out of that pit and sold by the Midianites into Egypt. Through time, Joseph became governor over the whole land of Egypt and responsible for the food supply chain. I have been thinking since our brother gave us that word from Gen 41:55 as to “Go to Joseph: what he says to you, that do” (see A Word in its Season April 2022) of the blessedness of all that there is in the Lord Jesus. Joseph became that wonderful administrator of food in Egypt, and the cry is still, ”Go to Joseph”: go to Christ for salvation; go to Christ for resource; go to Christ for blessing.
Despite what Joseph's brethren did to him and their hatred of him – and despite what the world and men have done with and to Christ – God still desires the sinner's blessing. Is that not wonderful? The hatred of man is met by the love of God. The distance from God that man has put himself in has been met by the death of the Lord Jesus Christ, inasmuch as God has come near to man in Christ. Joseph wanted to come near to his own brethren and to have a living and close relationship with them. God wants that! He wants that with you, friend. He does not want you to be at a distance from Him. So the gospel has in view living and close relationships being established with God's Son through repentance. Do you have that living and close relationship with the Lord Jesus? Joseph knew that his brethren were impoverished and he knew that they had to come to him for food. He used various ways to lead these persons to understand who he was. Maybe God is leading you in a certain way in order that you might come to know His blessed Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, for yourself. It says, “And Judah and his brethren came to Joseph's house”. They came back because the silver cup was found in Benjamin's sack; Joseph wanted his brethren to return to him, his longings were for them.
I spoke of patience and God being a God of patience, but think of the urgency of Joseph's desire that his brethren might come near to him. In chapter 37 they said, “Behold, there comes that dreamer! And now come and let us kill him”, v 19, 20. That is the world: “We will not that this man should reign over us”, Luke 19: 14. What a difference between the language of Joseph's brethren in chapter 37 and what Joseph says in chapter 45: 4: “Come near to me, I pray you”. What an answer! How wonderful Joseph was in his movements. And as they came back to the house it says, “and he was still there”. God is still here, and Christ is still near you. I would just like you to focus on these five words, “and he was still there”. Joseph might have been taken up with the governing of Egypt. He might have been taken up with all of his responsibility in the house of Pharaoh, but what he was interested in was the welfare of his brethren.
God's primary interest is in a repenting soul. Be amongst that number this afternoon, those who seek soul salvation. “And he was still there”; God is near to you in Christ, at this gospel preaching, with a view to saving you from your sins and giving you joy and peace by believing in His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Joseph was waiting for them patiently and wishing to establish with them that wonderful relationship because he loved them. They hated him and wanted to kill him in chapter 37, and Joseph's answer in chapter 45 was that he wanted them near him. Jesus would say that to every soul in this room: “Come near to me, I pray you”. Do not resist the overtures of grace.
I read in Luke 15 a parable as to a young man and his father's patience. The younger son went out from his father's presence with his share of his inheritance, and he would have said to himself, 'I am going to have a good time because I have now got money to spend'. Let me tell you something: Satan and the world are like leeches; they will take everything and give you nothing. God in His grace and goodness takes nothing and gives you everything! I can tell you that from personal experience.
And so this young man went far away from his father and home and it says he dissipated his property, living in debauchery. He just squandered his inheritance, leaving nothing to show for it. No one was there when he began to be in want because he had run out of money; it says, “no one gave to him”. You would think that someone would have taken pity on this poor man; remember what we sang at the outset as to Jesus being full of pity. “No one gave to him”; he was absolutely destitute. A man who may have gone from the presence of his father full of glee, with a spring in his step and out into the world, was now destitute. Quickly he realised that the far country was not what it had looked like at first. The glitter soon faded; underneath was darkness and death and demon. That simply is what the world is.
Interestingly, he began to have a conversation with himself. He began to think of his father's house amidst all this destitution. Was Satan able to help him? Were his friends able to help him? No; he was left completely alone. If you feel alone, God wants to have a conversation with you and He wants to come near to you. It says, “coming to himself”. Do you know what that means? It means the first indication of repentance. It means that he began to think how wrong he was. Unlike the sheep and the silver earlier in the chapter, this man had a spirit, a God-given spirit. And we each have a spirit, and through our spirit and our conscience God speaks to us. He began to speak to this younger son, and he began to think of his father's house; so he arose from where he was and went back in rather a different manner from how he left. Was the father occupied with what would have legally been his due, the running of his house and his servants? No, we can think of the father as “still there”, and looking out for his son every day, scanning the horizon for one who had left in such a way that you could say the father would have been justifiably angry with him. Was he going to shut the door on him? Where there is true repentance, God does not operate like that. He does not condemn you; He condemns the sin but not the sinner. God loves you and is desirous of blessing you, as the father desired blessing for his son. He was brought right into the house as robed, ringed and shod.
Can I appeal to you? If you are in a far country morally (you might be sitting in this room but far away in your mind and soul from God), if you are there in that country of famine, may you be attracted through God's goodness and through repentance into the richness and fulness of the blessing that there is in the Lord Jesus Christ for you! Repent, friend. Repent; that is only what God requires from you:
Repentance only, God requires from man,
And faith in Christ, His well-beloved Son
We are shortly going to sing that well-known hymn, No 123:
God waits in grace with hands outstretched to bless –
That is like the father in this parable.
Now just a touch on the Spirit in Genesis 6. The scripture says, “My Spirit shall not always plead with Man; for he indeed is flesh; but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years”. God limits things. This dispensation is limited, and will not go on forever. Think if man had lived forever! It says that in chapter ,3, “And now, lest he stretch out his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever….!”, (v 22. God forbid! How could man in his sinfulness live forever? It would be a horrendous thought. So God limited life, and in Psalm 90 it speaks of “threescore years and ten; and if, by reason of strength, they be fourscore years”, v 10. Some here have gone beyond that through God's goodness.
I was just thinking that Jehovah says in this scripture, “My Spirit shall not always plead with Man”. Think of God's pleading with Man. He pleaded with Man through Noah. We know that Noah was a preacher of righteousness and a man who in building the ark was in the secret of what God was going to do on the earth. He wanted to save Noah and his household; so Noah went ahead and through obedience to God he built that ark. I suppose in Noah building the ark he was in effect echoing the words, “My Spirit shall not always plead with Man”. The time came when the floods appeared and only eight souls were saved out of the millions that may have existed on the earth at that time. These are sobering matters to think about in the glad tidings because they show that, while I have said that God is a God of grace, patience and mercy, there is a limit. There is a limit to this dispensation of grace.
The Spirit is still pleading with man at the moment. Pleading is a word which gives the idea of energy and action; it means that God is active in relation to the salvation of men but will not always be. This dispensation, the greatest and the longest dispensation we know of, is coming to a close soon. The signs are not exactly given to us in the world around (although we live in very troubled times), but what we can be assured of is that the time is surely coming when the door which is open now through the glad tidings will finally close and the Spirit will no longer plead with man because He will be no longer here; He goes with the church to glory.
So, while God in His patience is pleading, the Spirit will not always plead with man. Therefore I trust that as we go out of this room today everyone will know Christ as their Saviour. There might be no tomorrow for you; there might be no Monday at school for you children; and this day of grace might have finished. So make sure of your soul salvation today. God is near; He is still here; He is here in Christ. And the Spirit is pleading, and He will plead with your soul. Maybe you are going to be the last one. I trust that every soul this day will give their heart to Christ. And if you know the Lord as your Saviour, it gives great joy to the soul to give thanks to God for Christ, and to know the blessedness of having that relationship livingly established on the sure foundation of the blood of Christ. It is my eternal surety and salvation. And, my friend, God's desire is that your welfare also, your moral and spiritual welfare, might also be assured in that work of Jesus.
May that be your portion today, for His Name's sake.
Bo'ness
3rd April 2022