John 16: 22-28; 17: 11-12, 25-26
1 Peter 2: 24 to “tree”
Hebrews 1: 2-4
John 14: 1-3
Romans 8: 22-27
Revelation 21: 3-4
What is on my heart is to say a few words, maybe just impressions, about how divine Persons, having come into the economy, desire to be known individually by believers. Each of these passages refers to a divine Person as Himself or Itself. God in the Old Testament was known as Almighty God and as Jehovah, but the Persons of the Godhead were not distinguished. In the New Testament the Persons of the Godhead are distinguished and they are distinguished with a view to the believer coming to a knowledge of each Person. The Lord Jesus introduces the thought “the Father himself has affection for you, because ye have had affection for me” in this section when their hearts were grieved. These dear disciples that are spoken about here had been with the Lord for the three and a half years of His public ministry, and now He was going away to leave them, and they were broken-hearted. They thought the Lord Jesus had come to restore the kingdom to Israel. At that moment they were under the heel of the Roman Empire. A proud Jewish nation they were, revolting always against the Romans, but these disciples are the remnant of Israel, the true elect of God at that time, and they were attached to the Lord Jesus Christ, and they really thought He was going to set up the kingdom. Their hearts were grieved because He was going to die. He was going to leave them, He had been rejected, and He says to them, I know your hearts are grieved but, “I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no one takes from you”. He had spoken to them about the Father throughout His teaching in the three and a half years, and He says in this section that there is a day coming - that is our day - when “ye shall ask the Father in my name”. He says, “Hitherto ye have asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full”. He says, ’I am going to commit you to the Father’. That is a comfort, dear brethren. He says, ’I tell you, He has affection for you’. He does not say, ’the Father has affection for you’. He says, “the Father himself has affection for you”. That is an intense thought concerning this blessed divine Person, the Father, who has retained His place in deity. He does not take a lower place in the economy. For the sake of the young people, God always existed in Trinity in three Persons. In the Old Testament it was not revealed, but when He reveals Himself in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit He is coming within the range of the human mind, so that man can know it. The Trinity is beyond us. It involves infinitude but the economy, as we speak about it, involves God in revelation in those names of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He took the name of Father and we all understand what that name means in nature and so it gives us an indication of the characteristics of that Person in the Godhead. He is distinguished in the Godhead with a view to our coming into an appreciation of Him. He says, “I came out from the Father and have come into the world; again, I leave the world and go to the Father”. What was the Lord saying when He said that? They were grieving over His rejection. They knew that He came out from God. He says, “I came out from the Father ... and go to the Father”. He was telling them in secret that it was nothing to do with His rejection. He came out from the Father, that is, He had been sent. He was going to the Father; that was His object. Divine purpose was to be secured by the Lord Jesus. He was going to the Father. He says in chap 17: 1, “Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son may glorify thee”. That is more than the cross. That is Christ’s present position, “glorify thy Son, that thy Son may glorify thee”. That is His present position. That is where He was going. What a secret to grasp hold of, dear brethren. Things were not in the hands of men. They were in the hands of divine Persons. He came out from the Father and was going to the Father. And to leave with them, “the Father himself has affection for you” involves that He is indicating to them that sonship was in mind for them, sonship was in mind for us. What a thing to approach the Father in the understanding that you are sons; not just a sinner saved by grace, wonderful as that is, but you are a son, and “God has sent out the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father”, Gal 4: 6. What a joy that is!
In chapter 17: 11, the Lord was going out of the world. He had kept His disciples. Now He says, “Holy Father, keep them in thy name which thou hast given me”; that is, He had been given the Father’s name. The Lord had that Name amongst them when He kept them. Now He commits them to the Father, but not just the Father but, “Holy Father, keep them in thy name”. What a thing to grasp hold of, dear brethren. The Lord has committed us as going out of this world to the Father, known as “Holy Father”. He asked the Father to keep us in accordance with His holy Name. That is a wonderful thing to grasp. How do I get the gain of that? There is no doubt the Father would never fail in that request, but how do I get the gain of that? By keeping close to Him, by being near to Him, asking the Father to keep me in accordance with His holy Name. This chapter envisages the saints in the present dispensation being in the same place as the Lord was in His lifetime here; now the saints having the same relationship to the Father as Christ has, not the only-begotten Son but sons by adoption. He says, “keep them in thy name”. 1 Peter says, “Be ye holy, for I am holy. And if ye invoke as Father him who, without regard of persons ...”, chap 1: 16, 17. We are kept by the Father, known as the “Holy Father”. I would encourage us all to seek to be established in that relationship with the Father, known as “Holy Father”, to be kept in accordance with that name. In a world of evil and corruption, the believer can be kept. There is what is in you and me that will respond to that holy Name because there is a work of God in us. Grasp hold of that: there is a work of God in the believer. If you make way for the work of God in you, you will be kept in accordance with that holy Name.
Then later in the chapter it says, “Righteous Father, - and the world has not known thee, but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me.” The Lord distinguishes two companies. He distinguishes the world, and He distinguishes His saints. He appeals to the Father on the basis of righteousness, not now on the basis of holiness, but on the basis of righteousness. So we want to come into the knowledge of the Father as “Righteous Father”. If the Lord addressed Him as “Holy Father” and “Righteous Father”, we can address Him too. He Himself has affection for us because we have had affection for Christ. How delightful God finds the saints, those on the earth that have affection for the despised Jesus, “ye have had affection for me”. What holy intimacy we have with Himself. Dear believer, dear young believer, cultivate a personal known relationship with God as Father, “the Father himself”. Cultivate that relationship in the holy intimacy of your own room, that is where to cultivate it, in the intimacy of your room, a personal relationship with the Father. I know we can address Him publicly as that. That is right. But this involves intimacy for the believer. He says, “And I have made known to them thy name, and will make it known” - now listen to this, “that the love with which thou hast loved me”, that is the Father’s love for Christ, “may be in them”, that is in you and me. That is a wonderful capacity that we can love the Lord Jesus with the same love that the Father loves Him. It is true of us, dear brethren. It is true of you and me as the subject of divine operations. It is not true of the flesh in us; it is true of you and me as subject of divine operations, and by the gift of the Holy Spirit, that we are able to love the Lord Jesus with the same appreciation of love that the Father has for Him. That is what it says, “that the love with which thou hast loved me may be in them and I in them”. You find Christ dwells in us. You find a repose dwelling in the believer by the Holy Spirit; Christ dwells in the believer. What a company of persons believers are! You and I belong to that company. Do these things mean anything to you in your life? As you grow older they mean more and more to you, and I would exhort all of us, especially those that are younger, to seek to make acquaintance with the Father. Whatever the matters in your life are, you can go to the Father. Tell Him about them. He has an ear to listen to them. Why? Because you have affection for the Lord Jesus. What a delightful privilege believers have to have God known as Father. I would encourage you to speak to Him daily, perhaps more than daily but daily anyway. In the privacy of your life make known to Him your thoughts and calculations and ask Him to keep you according to that holy Name, and then as the Righteous Father He will take account of you as being apart from the world. He will take account of you as one who has love for Christ and the same quality of love that He has for Christ.
I come to the Lord Jesus in 1 Peter 2. You get another reference to “himself”. We are perhaps more acquainted with Jesus because of what it says here. It says in verse 24, “who himself bore our sins in his body on the tree”. It might just have said, ’who bore our sins in his body on the tree’, but every word of scripture means something. “Who himself bore our sins in his body on the tree”, that precious Saviour, that divine Person, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. No other divine Person became incarnate but, becoming incarnate, it says, “who himself bore our sins in his body on the tree”. Such a One as that, a divine Person come into manhood, a blessed Man, and He “bore our sins in his body on the tree”. Does it not affect you that that blessed Man bore our sins in His own body? “Him who knew not sin he has made sin for us, that we might become God’s righteousness in him”, 2 Cor 5: 21. That is going to be seen finally in eternity. If you are a believer in the Lord Jesus you are going to be in eternity as the righteousness of God. What a display! Everyone who is there will, I suppose, come into that description. You cannot think of any of the families not setting forth the righteousness of God in Christ because they have all been secured because He “bore our sins in his body on the tree”. Every believer who goes into eternity would be able to say, “who himself bore our sins in his body on the tree”. I think that is true.
In Hebrews 1 we get His exaltation. I refer to this scripture because it says, “having made by himself the purification of sins, set himself down on the right hand of the greatness on high”. How rightly crowned is Jesus! This blessed Person, the Son, a divine Person, made the worlds. Galaxies and galaxies in the far reaches of space that man’s puny mind seeks to explore, set out the greatness for the believer of the God who put them there, and that Person is the Lord Jesus Christ, “by whom also he made the worlds; who being the effulgence of his glory and the expression of his substance” - that is in His manhood - “and upholding all things by the word of his power”. He upholds the worlds. The sun and the moon and the stars and the galaxies all move because they are under the control of Christ. They are not left to do as they wish. There is no asteroid going to come into the earth unless divine Persons allow it to come in; wandering stars are all literally controlled in the heavens by Christ. And then it says of Him, “having made by himself the purification of sins”. It says there in the note, ’the form ... of the verb here, has a peculiar reflexive force, “having done it for himself”. Though we, as alone the sinners, have the profit, yet the work was done within his own person and work, without us’. We alone as sinners get the profit. “Having made by himself the purification of sins, set himself down on the right hand of the greatness on high, taking a place so much better than the angels, as he inherits a name more excellent than they”. He “set himself down”. Is it not right that Jesus should set Himself down “on the right hand of the greatness on high”? That is where He has set Himself down; that blessed Man has set Himself down. That is where He is at the present time. He “set himself down”. We might say only a divine Person could do that, “set himself down”! Also He says in the Scriptures, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up”, John 2: 19. Life was inherent in Jesus. He raised His own body. Now, that is an important matter in scripture, the power of life that was in Jesus. The other side, that He was raised by the glory of the Father (Rom 6: 4), brings out affections between divine Persons and the delight of the Father in raising that blessed Man from among the dead. In the Scriptures the actions of the Persons are distinguished. Keep scripture in its context; do not look for disparities in them; look for the divine thought in them. “Made by himself the purification of sins”, something He did by Himself; “set himself down on the right hand of the greatness on high”, that is what He did by Himself; “taking a place by so much better than the angels, as he inherits a name more excellent than they”. What is the name He inherits? The name of Son. It says later down, “Who makes his angels spirits and his ministers a flame of fire; but as to the Son ...”. Then it says, “Thy throne, O God, is to the age of the age”, v 7, 8. You get an intertwining of manhood and deity in these verses. We cannot hold them both in our minds at the same time but we can marvel at who He is and the place He has and the name He inherits.
From the place of majesty on high He is going to come for us. What I have to say is very simple, but I trust it will reach our affections, and bring us into a sphere of the activity of divine love. It says there in John 14, “In my Father’s house there are many abodes; were it not so, I had told you: for I go to prepare you a place; and if I go and shall prepare you a place, I am coming again and shall receive you to myself, that where I am ye also may be”. He is seated at the “the right hand of the greatness on high” - that is His place at the minute. He is going to rise from there. The Father does not come for us and the Spirit does not come for us. The Spirit is here, but the Lord comes for us. He comes Himself. It says in 1 Thessalonians, “for the Lord himself, with an assembling shout, with archangel’s voice and with trump of God”, chap 4: 16. He is going to come personally. That is the hope of the believer. He is going to come for us personally and “we shall be always with the Lord”, v 17. He is going to take us to where He is, that is, into the presence of the Father. That is where He is. He is going to take us there. He uses the figure of the temple. He says, “In my Father’s house there are many abodes”. In the temple in Jerusalem there were many abodes, and the Lord uses the figure so that those to whom He was speaking would understand. It shows the grace of Christ, the grace of divine Persons. They adapt themselves to humanity. They speak in a language that we can understand. “In my Father’s house there are many abodes ... for I go to prepare you a place”. He has prepared a place for us. That is a specific place; that is a place for the assembly distinctively. Other matters are His matters, the place prepared for other families, but for the saints in the present dispensation He has prepared a place for us and He is coming for us “and shall receive you to myself”. He is speaking to His own here as belonging to the assembly, but He is going to come for all the saints from Abel onwards, all the dead in Christ are going to be raised and taken to heaven. All will be caught up to be with the Lord Himself. So He says, “I am coming again ... that where I am ...”. Where He is, is a very blessed atmosphere. He is associated with the Father and He is going to bring us into that place.
Now I come to Romans 8. In this scripture it says, “the Spirit itself”. It is to me a very remarkable scripture because we generally associate the Holy Spirit with a spiritual area as in 1 Corinthians 2. It says there, “for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God ... thus also the things of God knows no one except the Spirit of God. But we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God, that we may know the things which have been freely given to us of God” (v 10-12), and so on. In Romans it is an area of creation. It says, “For we know”, that is believers, “that the whole creation groans together and travails in pain together until now”. That is the whole of creation, even the animal creation groans on account of the fall of man, and suffers. “And not only that, but even we ourselves, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, we also ourselves groan in ourselves, awaiting adoption”. That is, we feel the burdens of the present state of things and the burdens of the physical condition. There are burdens relating to this toilsome life, and the Spirit of God comes alongside us. What a blessed thing for the Spirit to draw near. We are “awaiting adoption, that is the redemption of our body”. That is the final act of salvation, the redemption of our body. And then it says, “And in like manner the Spirit joins also its help to our weakness; for we do not know what we should pray for as is fitting, but the Spirit itself makes intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered”. That is the Spirit of God expressing in the divine presence what is in the heart of a believer - all the pressures of the way, not only individual matters but particularly related to the testimony. The Spirit of God is particularly related to the testimony and the effect on the testimony, affecting creation, of the fall of man and sin. So Paul says of the believer, “for we do not know what we should pray for as is fitting”. One person pointed out recently that it does not say, ’if we do not know’, it says “for we do not know what we should pray for as is fitting”. There are burdens on your spirit, and you wonder how to pray, what to say, “but the Spirit itself”, that blessed Person who indwells you and me, “makes intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered”, and then, and this is an important matter, “But he who searches the hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit”. That is the hearts of believers, that is God searching the hearts of the believer, and He finds in the believer those feelings of the Holy Spirit that He Himself, the Spirit, expresses because the believer is personally unable to express them. God finds those feelings in the heart of the believer, feelings that He can rejoice in. The heart of God is gladdened by what He finds in the believer, “But he who searches the hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit”. God searches our hearts. He finds there some expression by the Holy Spirit of divine feelings that are a comfort to Him. He finds them because the Spirit is there present in the heart of the believer, expressing the feelings of the believer in the divine presence “with groanings which cannot be uttered”. That is a comfort to us. I just thought to draw attention to this matter, the Holy Spirit itself in this area, not in the area of privilege or a spiritual area, but in the area of dependency and feeling. How sin has ravaged the creation of God, ravaged man and brought in a state where there are “groanings which cannot be uttered”, fallen creation. The whole section deals with that, anticipating the day of redemption for even the creature. It says in verse 20 and 21, “for the creature has been made subject to vanity”, that is God’s creature, “not of its will, but by reason of him who has subjected the same, in hope that the creature itself also shall be set free from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God.” Creation is going to be liberated when Christ comes, and in the meantime there is a divine Person here who carries those feelings, the Holy Spirit itself. It says, “the Spirit joins also its help to our weakness”. Well, we can understand that, frailty, infirmity, and then we are encouraged by, “for we do not know what we should pray for as is fitting”. That is an encouragement that He intercedes with God, and I say to you again, God finds in your heart and my heart those feelings that are expressed by the Holy Spirit.
Finally I come to Revelation 21, and this matter of “God himself”. We have been speaking about distinguishing of divine Persons in relation to the believer coming into a knowledge of each One, and that is a precious truth, but do not let us forget that God is one. The Old Testament insists there is but one God, but in the New Testament, when the revelation of God is made known in the economy, scripture states that God is one, 1 Tim 2: 5; Gal 3: 20. There is but one mind. Sometimes divine Persons are not distinguished for us and we would address God as God with holy reverence. Revelation 21: 3 represents the eternal day, and it says, “and God himself shall be with them, their God”; “God himself”. Oh the blessedness of addressing God as God. We know there are three Persons but we do not have capacity always to distinguish them. In speaking to Him as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as far as I can carry in my mind, you are distinguishing the Persons of the Godhead in all their glory, and yet in unity and oneness. When God is before you, it is a blessed Person that you know. Ever retain the blessedness, dear brethren, of addressing God as God. “God himself shall be with them, their God”. God as known has taken His abode in the tabernacle, which is the assembly. In the eternal day “the tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall tabernacle with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, their God”. Wonderful thing! We do not always have to differentiate the Persons. We can worship God as God, the greatness of who He is, the One who operated to bring in all things according to His own mind, the One who is going to dwell eternally with men, that blessed, holy Being. So our hearts can be filled with worship in relation to God Himself.
May the Lord just encourage us with these simple impressions. For His Name’s sake.
Witney
18th October 2008