Revelation 21: 1-4

         I am always impressed with the fact that, as our brother has said, God came down into the garden that He might walk with man.  Think of that: God was looking for company.  You think of the greatness of God, but He created man that man should be for His pleasure, and that He should find His company there.  That is a wonderful thing.  The sad thing is, of course, that sin came in and that was lost and lost completely; and yet God Himself has worked to secure that which was in His mind.  He never gives up things that are in His mind, but He works in His own way, and our brother has touched that in what he has said this evening.  One of the things that strikes me is that God came down to walk with Adam, but here it does not say that: it says, “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”.  I think that is something much more intimate.  If I might use the expression, it is much closer.  If you walk with somebody there is a degree of separation there, but here it says that He would tabernacle with them.  I think that is something very wonderful just to think of what lies before us, beloved brethren, as we think of eternity and think of what God is securing for His own pleasure.  It does not say anything about tabernacling in Genesis, or indeed in the Scriptures generally.  You have to wait until you come to the end of the Scriptures to find out that it was in the mind of God that He should tabernacle with men.  Think of that, that He should dwell with men.  He not only comes into man’s circumstances, though He certainly does, but as a result of the operations of Christ and the Spirit there is that in the assembly that is able to answer fully to the pleasure of God Himself.  There is no disparity about it.  There is nothing to hinder God tabernacling or dwelling with men.  How near that is; how near God would come to men.  He comes to us, we might say, and the wonderful point of it is that He finds His pleasure in it.  How wonderful that is!  Our brother has read very helpfully about the history of man and all that came in, and what has been secured through the present dispensation.  When we come to the end of the book it tells us that God is to tabernacle with men.

         Well that is all I had in my mind, but just to show the glory of what is in the mind of God and the intimacy that there will be there with nothing to hinder.  Not a stroke will be there to hinder God getting all that He had in His mind from the very beginning.  He will have it there as He tabernacles with men.

         May the Lord help us in this for His Name’s sake.

Edinburgh

10th May 2011