THE DAY OF GRACE
Dave A Barlow
Ephesians 4: 9-10
1 Kings 18: 41-45 (to ‘rain’)
Ecclesiastes 11: 3
Jeramiah 8: 20
I am not intending to refer directly to the first scripture that we read, but it might be a key for the rest of the scriptures we are going to consider. I seek help, beloved, to say a word or two as to the greatness of the day of grace that we are in; the significance of it, the importance of it. We sang in our hymn at the outset of this meeting:
Message of Jesus, message of love,
Telling of welcome to that bright home above!
(Hymn 202),
and you will notice that there is a sober tone in the second two scriptures I read. There is, at the end of both of those scriptures, the thought of permanency, the thought of something happening from which there is no going back, a moment that every person must face, when their time of responsibility here upon the earth is ended. And when that time comes, the message of welcome to that man, that woman, that boy or girl, will no longer apply. I do not wish to dwell on the sobriety of that; what I want to talk to you about is this present time, a time when God is presenting His Saviour, His beloved Son, the One who has accomplished all things to God’s eternal satisfaction. God would have you to receive Him for yourself; He would have you to accept the work Christ accomplished on the cross for you, so that you can come into all the favour and blessing that God has in mind for you. That is the time we are in now, “a sound of abundance of rain”; and it is possible for God to bless you because everything that is contrary to God, everything that you and I have done, and everything that you and I are that brought in distance from God, has been met by the perfection of the work of Christ, so that God can now present in love His beloved Son for you to accept for yourself.
I thought about the beauty of this scripture in 1 Kings. I would commend to everyone to read about Elijah, and Elisha too; the sections of scripture where they are mentioned are full of wonderful stories, and here we come to the end of one of those stories. It comes in during a period of history when Israel had set up a false god, Baal, whom the king of Israel through a wicked queen called Jezebel had installed as a god to replace the God of Israel. Then there had been a great public test, directed by Elijah, to see whether Baal was the true God, or whether Jehovah was the true God, and you can read about that. But also, for over three years before the time that we have read of, there had been drought over the whole land, no rain at all, and this section tells us about the moment when that drought period ended. You can imagine the desperate need at this point for water upon the earth. A drought can be very destructive; men cannot live long without water: so we can say there was a great need, a desperate need, for water. This is much like today spiritually, if you look at the conditions of the world around. What desperate need there is; how men are searching for an answer, some lasting satisfaction, and finding none. How many political ideas there are. We were considering that locally on Thursday during our reading; we thought about all these ideas that men bring up,- and we likened them to one of the plagues in Egypt, to the frogs that filled the houses and filled the land of Egypt. You can imagine the frogs jumping around everywhere, how like men who seem to have all these different plans and ideas, with no one having any lasting solution, and eventually every idea ends up being added to those stinking heaps. There is no satisfaction there: someone comes up with an idea, and it gets them nowhere, and then someone else comes up with a different idea, and it gets them nowhere too. There is no satisfaction and no life found in such things.
Thus, the world is in drought; what is there for us, what can we do, what can be done? Think of the drought that was upon the earth when the Lord came, nothing for God. It says that God looked upon the children of men to see if any did seek Him (Ps 14: 2; 53: 2); there were none, they had all turned back: but He found in Christ the one Man in whom He could have His full satisfaction, the object of His delight. And that is the cloud we read of here, no bigger than a man's hand. Think of that, all the potential that was found in Christ, the One whom God could mark out, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I have found my delight”, Matt 3: 17. He walked upon this earth, a Man amongst men, yet perfectly apart from them, wholly satisfying His God and Father, walking entirely according to the will of God. What a Man He is! What a Man He was! So our scripture says, “there is a cloud, small as a man's hand, arising out of the sea”. What did that mean?
We read in Ephesians that “he also descended into the lower parts of the earth”; think of that: think of the depths that were fathomed when He was made sin. He was made that, to bear what you and I, beloved, rightly deserved; He was made what God hated; He was made that which His holy soul recoiled from. God made Him to be sin for us, and there upon the cross He endured for all who have trusted in Him, and in obedience to the will of His God and Father, the wrath of a holy and righteous God. He went down to “the lower parts of the earth”, He became dead, but, “He that descended is the same who has also ascended”, and that is the cloud coming up out of the sea. Think of what Elijah knew when he realised that cloud was coming; what was the answer? There was going to be the sound of the abundance of rain, the whole sky was going to be filled, there was the wind, there was the darkness, and there was the pour of rain, “that the pour of rain stop thee not”. Elijah had a view prophetically of what was going to be secured out of the death of Christ; what is there that God cannot do? And now that He has His beloved Son set at His right hand, God is able to offer everything. He is able to bless you “with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ”, Eph 1: 3. He is able to offer you salvation; He is able to offer you a place with Christ forever. How wonderful, and that is what I thought about: as we read of the sky being filled here, so also the Christ will “fill all things”, fill all heaven and all the earth. What a time it will be in the eternal day when it will be seen that Christ is the centre of the universe, but right now He is the Centre of all that God delights in, and it is He whom God commends to you in the glad tidings: what a gospel!
So, the question now comes to you, will you accept Him? I would like now to draw attention to this passage in Ecclesiastes, “If the clouds be full of rain”. If we link it to our scripture in Ephesians, where it says that “he might fill all things”, it is like the clouds full of rain. And, if you just picture this, it is as if ever since the Lord has been set at the Father's right hand, there has been a pouring of blessing from heaven. The glad tidings have gone out, and it has been presented to you time and again; the day of grace has gone on; the pouring out upon you for blessing has gone on and on, and it has gone on from God’s side for about 2000 years. “If the clouds be full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth”; how good God is; how patient He has been with me, how patient He has been with you, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. You have heard the glad tidings, you know the terms of the gospel, how many times did you ignore it? But the rain continued. God has continued, His hands outstretched to bless, continued to commend His Son to you. So, in this application, you or I are like these trees in Ecclesiastes; if I can just apply it this way, the rain is constantly pouring upon the earth, constantly upon these trees, and a tree is rooted to the earth, is it not? That is one of the ways the Lord is marked out, as “a root out of dry ground” (Isa 53: 2), but you and I, we are rooted to the earth; we rely on the earth for our sustenance, but we are also bound here, and we are bound here as part of a fallen race. We are bound and marked by sin, and we live in an earth that is tainted by sin and soon is to go on to destruction. That is like a tree rooted upon this earth, and then it says, “if a tree fall towards the south, or toward the north, in the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be”, and you see that is a moment that happens to every tree; the question is, when a tree falls, where will it fall? Think of the permanency of it.
I was struck by this: I was walking back to my car after work earlier this year, and it involved walking on a bridge over a busy road. And on that particular evening the road had been closed to cars, and very near the bridge, in the road, you could see one of those white police tents. As I continued back to my car, I was able to speak to a security guard at the carpark, who had seen the incident, and it transpired that a man, presumably because he was late to catch a bus, chose, instead of going over the bridge, to run across the road, and that was it: he was struck by a car. I thought about that; his tree had fallen. Did it fall to the north? I do not know. But what struck me was, that morning as I was walking that exact route to work, the favour of God was towards both him and me, the day of grace was available to both him and me, and then, when I walked back that same route a few hours later, it was available just to me. The permanency of that is very sober to think about, because God has appealed to you time and again in the glad tidings, and He appeals to you again even now.
Beloved, I cry to you, fall to the south; what does that mean, fall to the south? It means you give up everything here, and commit your life to Christ: fall to the south, to see that Christ died for you, and see, though you deserved to be condemned because of all that you are, He took up the matter for you. Give up what is here; cast your life upon Christ; let your tree fall to the south, beloved. You see you can fall to the south now; that does not have to wait till you die. If the tree fall to the south, that speaks of the permanency of the work of Christ; it means you can fall upon Him. Give up your life to Him: find that everything that binds you here, and is already condemned, that would hinder your blessing, is seen to have been removed, if you fall upon Christ, and commit your life to Him, beloved. Do not wait; do not leave it; do not be one of those who decides to put it off for another week, because, alas, there will be some, perhaps even this week if we are left here, whose tree will fall and God alone knows whether they fall to the north or fall to the south. Beloved, do not give it another moment, fall upon Christ, commit your life to Him, let your tree fall to the south.
Now I just want to draw attention to this scripture in Jeremiah, which has another sober message to it. Not to be occupied exactly with the negativity of it, what I want to say about this verse, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended”, is that it does not apply yet. The harvest is not yet past, and the summer is not yet ended. At this moment today the Lord would say, “behold the fields, for they are already white to harvest” (John 4: 35), and the summer, we might say is at its height. God's grace is shining towards you now; it is the very middle of the summer, and the beneficence of God is towards you. How wonderful it is, this day of grace.
I have thought a little bit about this scripture, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved”. This is a prophetic scripture, I believe, which means some will come to this realisation in a future day; they will know the reality of these sober words. And if some come to this, it means that they will recognise when it was harvest time, and it means they will recognise when it was summertime. You might say, by application, they were aware of the glad tidings, they were aware of what God offered in the glad tidings, and they knew, I suppose, or they could see something of the blessing of it, but they put it off because they had other things to do. They were aware it was harvest time; perhaps they even saw others, who evidently were enjoying something they did not; they saw there was a harvest time, and they were aware of all these things, and yet they put it off.
We were walking through a recently harvested field on Friday, and there is nothing there when the harvest has passed; there are just little stalks in the ground. Anything that is for benefit to anyone has already gone, and perhaps if you think about it, for some going back to school, it does feel like the summer has ended, does it not? I remember when I was at school, when you first started off your school holidays, the summer holidays stretched before you, it seemed to go on for ages, and the closer you got to the end of the school holidays the faster time seemed to go, and then you had those horrible advertisements on shop windows, ‘Back to school’. I always hated that reminder, going ‘back to school’. And I found I began to get a bit more concerned the nearer it got to that point, wondering what the next year would bring, and things that needed to be done before it started became increasingly urgent.
But you see what we are speaking about here is different: not only has the summer holidays, if I can speak carefully and reverently, gone on for over two thousand years; but we do not know when it will end. There will come a moment when the harvest is finished; everything that God seeks to secure in Christ will be finished. The summer will be over, there will come that moment, and, alas, there will be some who then say, “and we are not saved”. Do not be among them: come into the favour and blessing and grace of God, accept Jesus as your own personal Saviour, and find what it means to know Him as your Lord, as your Head.
Well, beloved I am conscious, that there is much more to the ‘full gospel’, and I understand that I am speaking to an audience who have heard the gospel before, have heard of the wonderful grace of God, have heard of the favour God has to bestow upon you, have heard about the blessed gift of the Holy Spirit of God. All of these things perhaps you have heard as terms: beloved, I would implore you to find them out for yourself. If you only know them as terms, find out what it means, that God has given the gift of His blessed Holy Spirit to those that obey, find out what that means for you, find out what that means for God too, to have those with whom He is pleased to bestow His Holy Spirit upon, those that can answer to Him in worship and adoration and praise, those that love Christ, the One that He loves. I commend the glad tidings to you for your blessing and to God's glory.
For the Lord's name’s sake.
Sidcup
1st September 2024