The Lord saith unto my Lord, Sit Thou at My right hand,
Until I make Thine enemies Thy footstool.
The Lord will send forth the rod of Thy strength out of Zion:
Rule Thou in the midst of Thine enemies.
Thy people offer themselves willingly
In the day of Thy power, in holy array:
Out of the womb of the morning
Thou hast the dew of Thy youth.
The Lord hath sworn, and will not repent:
Thou art a priest for ever
After the order of Melchizedek.
The Lord at Thy right hand
Will strike through kings in the day of His wrath.
He will judge among the nations,
He will fill the places with dead bodies;
He will strike through the head in many countries.
He will drink of the brook in the way:
Therefore will He lift up the head.
Father, we want to thank Thee that Thou hast already answered our prayer, and we believe that Thou hast made provision for us for this evening. And now, Lord, all we want to do, speaker and hearer alike, is to recognize our weakness and our utter dependence upon the gracious ministry of Thy Holy Spirit.
But we do thank Thee that He has come to glorify the Lord Jesus, and to take of the things of the Lord Jesus and make them real to us. We would look to Thee that in this time Thou wilt do just that. Give us a spirit of quietness, Lord, we pray, and help us to hear Thy voice beyond the human voice. For we ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.
I have spoken already from Psalm 110. I have drawn one lesson from this psalm: the absolute victory of our risen, glorified Head. We have spoken about the end being absolutely secured through the finished work of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the fact that He has ascended on high and has sat down at the right hand of God the Father.
The Father has said to Him, “Sit Thou at My right hand, until I make Thine enemies Thy footstool.”
Now, this evening, without going over what we have already said, I want to turn to a second lesson that we find in verse 2. I call it the eternal purpose of God: Zion, Christ, and His own.
The phrase I want particularly to underline tonight is in verse 2:
The Lord will send forth the rod of Thy strength out of Zion:
Rule Thou in the midst of Thine enemies.
We shall have a little more to say tomorrow morning about the rod of Thy strength and about His ruling in the midst of His enemies. But the phrase I want to underline tonight is this little phrase: out of Zion.
Anyone who even superficially reads the Bible must come across this name again and again. You read through the Psalms, Isaiah, and the other prophets, and you read continually about Zion. Zion is the delight of God. Zion is the dwelling place of God. Zion is the place which the Lord has chosen—Mount Zion, sometimes called the city of God.
What does Zion mean? It is not only found in the Old Testament; we find it in the New Testament as well. Such an important name, such an important idea—what does it really signify?
There are four things I want to underline in answering that question.
First of all, Zion refers to an actual mountain: Mount Zion. In 2 Samuel 5:7, we read:
Nevertheless David took the stronghold of Zion; the same is the city of David.
In Psalm 48:2, we read:
Beautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth,
Is Mount Zion, on the sides of the north,
The city of the great King.
Jerusalem is built upon three mountains. God chose three mountains which together constitute a little plateau, surrounded by higher mountains. The people of God were not given a high place. The Gentile nations chose high places—the highest places upon which to build an altar or temple—but God chose three hills, all lower than the hills surrounding Jerusalem.
Mount Olivet, Mount Scopus, French Hill, Ramallah, the Mount of Offence, the Hill of Evil Counsel—every one of them is higher than Mount Zion, Mount Ophel, and Mount Moriah. The three mountains which constitute the city of Jerusalem are Mount Moriah, Mount Ophel, and Mount Zion.
So that is the first little geography lesson. What is Zion? Zion is a geographical place. It is a mountain upon which the city of Jerusalem was built, one of the three hills upon which the city was built.
Secondly, Zion came to mean the city of David, or the city of Jerusalem. Look at Psalm 48:
Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised,
In the city of our God, in His holy mountain.
Beautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth,
Is Mount Zion, on the sides of the north,
The city of the great King.
Then, in verses 12 and 13:
Walk about Zion, and go round about her;
Number the towers thereof.
Mark ye well her bulwarks,
Consider her palaces,
That ye may tell it to the generation following.
In other words, it was a city. So often, when we read of Zion, it does not speak merely of the actual Mount Zion, but of Jerusalem, the city itself.
There is another way in which we have to look at this word Zion, and that is the national and political meaning. Now, here we get into a controversial area. But in my estimation, there is a national and political implication in the way Scripture uses the word Zion.
For instance, turn to Psalm 137. This is what we call Zionism. This is where it was founded:
By the rivers of Babylon,
There we sat down, yea, we wept,
When we remembered Zion.
Upon the willows in the midst thereof
We hanged up our harps.
For there they that led us captive required of us songs,
And they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying,
Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song
In a foreign land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,
Let my right hand forget her skill.
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,
If I remember thee not;
If I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Upon this psalm, what we call Zionism—the longing of the Jewish people for their homeland, for the re-creation of the Jewish state as a sovereign state among the states of the world—is founded. It has a much deeper foundation than that, and I am not going to speak on that this evening, or I should speak for an hour or two on this matter.
Turn, for instance, to Isaiah 59:20:
And a Redeemer will come to Zion,
And unto them that turn from transgression in Jacob,
Saith the Lord.
The New Testament quotes this in Romans 11:26:
And so all Israel shall be saved: even as it is written,
There shall come out of Zion the Deliverer;
He shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob.
By the Spirit of God, the apostle Paul says that this verse is going to be fulfilled in the reconstitution of the Jewish people as a sovereign nation among nations. But it speaks of far more than that: it speaks of the veil of the Jewish heart being taken away and of a great turning to the Lord.
Zechariah speaks of a mourning in which every family mourns apart, husbands and wives apart. That cannot be a nation born in a day. Some people tell me that all Jewish people are going to be regenerated in a day. I say that the nation was born in a day—in May 1948, the nation was recreated.
But the fact remains that Zechariah speaks of a looking unto Him whom they pierced, when the Spirit of grace and supplication is poured out upon them. They shall mourn for Him as for an only son, and be in bitterness for Him as for a firstborn who hath died.
Anyone who knows anything of Jewish burial customs will know that there are seven days of absolute mourning, in which the whole of life is disrupted, and one month in which life is quite abnormal. To me, this means that there is going to come, in the end, the most incredible thing in world Jewry, especially in Israel.
There is going to be a movement of the Spirit of God in which the Jewish people will recognize, as no other nation has in the whole history of nations, the significance of their history in the light of Jesus the Messiah. Jesus was born King of the Jews, and He died King of the Jews.
There will never be another Jewish king until He comes, whose right it is to reign. The most wonderful thing is that when that day happens, the Bible says it will be life from the dead.
So, when people tell me that Zionism is merely a political movement and has nothing to do with the work of God, I have a great argument with them. I find in the Word of God that, whatever the failings of political Zionism as a movement, God’s Word predicted it. The creation of the state of Israel is by the hand of God in their unbelief, according to the Word of God.
Listen to Jeremiah 31:10:
Hear the word of the Lord, O ye nations,
And declare it in the isles afar off, and say,
He that scattered Israel will gather him,
And keep him, as a shepherd doth his flock.
For the Lord hath ransomed Jacob,
And redeemed him from the hand of him that was stronger than he.
And they shall come and sing in the height of Zion,
And shall flow unto the goodness of the Lord,
To the grain, and to the new wine, and to the oil,
And to the young of the flock and of the herd:
And their soul shall be as a watered garden;
And they shall not sorrow any more at all.
Then verse 17 says:
And there is hope for thy latter end, saith the Lord;
And thy children shall come again to their own border.
I am quite sure that there are spiritual lessons to be gained from those verses, but there is also a geographical, national, and political meaning in the word. So we cannot dismiss Zion as being only spiritual.
But then comes the fourth and most important meaning: the spiritual and eternal. Here the Word of God takes Mount Zion, the actual mountain, and takes the city of Jerusalem and invests it with symbolic significance.
Even the national and political movement of Zionism will, in the end, fulfil the purpose of God. All the nations will see it. Every nation that comes against this little nation will be broken because of her—whether it be the United States, Russia, Britain, or any other nation in the world.
That is because God is going to vindicate Himself. There is more to Israel than flesh and blood. But, thank God, we can all look beyond the national and political, beyond the physical and geographical, beyond the actual city, to the spiritual and eternal. Here we come into something simply wonderful.
Take Psalm 50:
The Mighty One, God, the Lord, hath spoken,
And called the earth from the rising of the sun
Unto the going down thereof.
Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty,
God hath shined forth.
I do not know whether dear old Jerusalem has ever been the perfection of beauty. Many who go there are deeply disappointed. They expect to see beautiful elevation and perfection of beauty, and all they find is dirt and dust and fleas and mosquitoes and noise and all the rest of it.
It has never been very different. Even when Solomon’s temple stood there in all its glory, Jerusalem was a flea-bitten place when compared with Babylon, with its magnificent boulevards, avenues, canals, hanging gardens, botanical gardens, zoological gardens, stock exchange, and postal system.
Babylon was glorious. But Jerusalem? All the great capitals of the world are built upon great crossroads, great natural harbours, or navigable rivers. But not Jerusalem. She is not on any crossroads; the great trade routes of the ancient world passed either east or west of her.
There is no great natural harbour in Jerusalem. There is no river. The River Jordan—you in America would not sneeze over it. You could swallow it up in one of your little unnamed rivers. Even the Thames is bigger than the Jordan.
What, then, is the desire for Jerusalem? How does He call it, “Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God hath shined forth,” unless Jerusalem, from the very beginning, has been a symbol of an eternal reality?
There is something deep within the heart of God—something in the mind of God which He had before He created the universe, before He created man. He had in His heart something that we now call Zion: the city of God, the house of God, the dwelling place of God.
Listen to Hebrews 12:22:
But ye are come unto Mount Zion,
And unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem,
And to innumerable hosts of angels,
To the general assembly and church of the firstborn
Who are enrolled in heaven.
You who are redeemed by the blood of the Lamb have come to Mount Zion. What Mount Zion? Most of the redeemed have never even been to the physical Mount Zion. Their feet have never stood upon its soil and dust. What does it mean?
Then, just to confuse us, Hebrews 13:14 says:
For we have not here an abiding city,
But we seek after the city which is to come.
How does the writer contradict himself? First he tells us we are in the city, then he says we are not there yet. What is he talking about?
In Revelation 21 we read:
And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God,
Made ready as a bride adorned for her husband.
And I heard a great voice out of the throne, saying,
Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men,
And He shall dwell with them, and they shall be His peoples,
And God Himself shall be with them, and be their God:
And He shall wipe away every tear from their eyes;
And death shall be no more;
Neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain, any more:
The first things are passed away.
And He that sitteth on the throne said,
Behold, I make all things new.
Dear people of God, here we come home. You may feel, “What has physical Mount Zion got to do with us? What has the city of Jerusalem, five thousand miles away, got to do with us? What has the national movement of Jewish Zionism got to do with us?” Actually, it has a lot to do with you, but that is another subject.
When you come to the spiritual and eternal, every one of you must surely know: this has everything to do with us. If you are redeemed of God, if you are a saint of God, if you have been born of the Spirit of God, then you have come to Zion.
First of all, you have come to Zion, and Zion is in you by your very birth. Something has happened. Oh, dear child of God, whether you know it or not, whether you think about it or not, you have come to Zion and Zion is in you, if you are born of God.
It only needs someone like me to sing a song or say a few words, and it awakens chords within you. You may never have thought of it, but deep within every redeemed human heart the highways for Zion have been implanted.
We may not know it. We may not understand it. It may have been overlaid by institutionalism, organizationalism, denominationalism, or whatever else you like to call it. But within our hearts, by our very new birth, the highways for Zion have been implanted. We have come to Zion, and Zion has come into us.
Now, dear people of God, let us look a little further at this whole matter. “Out of Zion, the Lord will send forth the rod of Thy strength.” What does this mean?
Where is our Lord at this very moment as I speak? He is at the right hand of God the Father. What does it mean, then, that the Lord will send forth the rod of Thy strength out of Zion?
It must mean that somehow this spiritual reality involves us in the heavenlies. It takes in the throne of God the Father and the earth itself. Every born-again child of God has been born into a union with God that connects both heaven and earth.
Do you understand what I am talking about? Well, I hope you will. Years ago, I heard a speaker on this kind of subject. At the end he said, “Some of you will not understand what I am talking about, but I feel like a tourist guide. I am taking you up a cable car to a high point and showing you a distant horizon. You will never be the same again.”
Well, I hope you will not. That kind of holy discontent is the best thing in the whole wide world.
Out of Zion: the eternal dwelling place of God, the bride, the wife of the Lamb. That is what Scripture speaks of concerning this city. Some people think of a city in which one day they are going to walk up and down streets of gold and through gates of pearl.
But if you look carefully at this city in the last two chapters of Revelation, you quickly get into traffic problems. The city is twelve hundred miles long, twelve hundred miles wide, and twelve hundred miles high. It is a cube.
Then there are twelve pearl gates and one street. If you thought you had traffic problems in Richmond, imagine that! Perhaps it is a spiral, of some sort.
But in the midst of this great street runs a river, and on either side are trees of life for the healing of the nations. When we begin to look at this city, we discover that it is built of three materials: gold, precious stones, and pearl.
The gold is like no gold of earth. You have never seen gold transparent as crystal, through which you can see. Yet the whole city is produced out of this translucent, transparent gold.
It becomes clear that this city is primarily symbolic of a spiritual reality. It is the Zion of God, the new Jerusalem, the city of God. And it is called the bride, the wife of the Lamb.
No one refers to Washington as the wife of the President. No one refers to Richmond as the wife of the mayor. So it is quite clear that this city has a tremendous meaning and significance.
It is a city because it is a centre of government and administration for all eternity. It is a bride because it is a union in life with God. It is a family; it has a family character.
It is not simply some great administrative apparatus, royal machinery, or a marvellous organization for the divine eternal civil service. May the Lord preserve us! Of course there is an administration. Of course there is an eternal government. There is a throne there, and you and I are called to sit down with Him in His throne.
But it is far more than that. It is a love relationship which is eternal—an eternal union and communion with the Lamb. It is an eternal discovery of the Lord Jesus.
Did you think that all you would ever discover about the Lord Jesus and about God was here on earth? My friends, you have some delights coming. If you thought it wonderful to find the Lord down here and to see something more, wait until you get there. There is infinitely more than the greatest Christian has ever understood.
Listen to Psalm 132:13-14:
For the Lord hath chosen Zion;
He hath desired it for His habitation.
This is My resting-place for ever:
Here will I dwell; for I have desired it.
What a wonderful word. “He hath desired it for His habitation.” That is rather an old-fashioned word. He has desired it for His home. That makes it much more understandable, does it not? He has desired it for His home.
Somewhere back in eternity past, before ever a single star was flung into its place, before ever this planet was set spinning on its course, before ever man was created and the breath of God breathed into him, there was in the heart of God a desire.
What was that desire? It was to have a people who could come into union with Himself; a people who could become partakers of His divine nature; a people who could, as it were, be His home.
God does not dwell in forests, lakes, sky, or air. He does not dwell in houses made of stone and wood. God dwells in a home constituted by redeemed human beings.
The purpose of God from the very beginning was to make a kind of man and a kind of woman who had a capacity for Him; who could eat of the tree of life, partake of eternal life, enter into union with Himself, and become one with the Son.
Would it not have been wonderful if there had been no fall? But then, of course, you would not be here, and I would not be here. So we have to thank the Lord that, in some wonderful and mysterious way, God has ordained more kingdom.
He sent His Son into this world to undo the fall, to bear away the sin of the world, and to open the gate back to Paradise. The most defiled and hopeless sinner might be washed in the blood of the Lamb, loosed from his sins, joined to God through Jesus Christ, and made an heir of God and a joint-heir with Jesus Christ.
What a wonderful privilege, then, is yours and mine. Do you understand it? Do you really realize what it means?
If we began to glimpse just a little of it, we would suddenly realize one simple but marvellous thing: our salvation is not an end, but a means to an end.
Our salvation is not the whole of God. It is the beginning of God. It is the instrument of God. It is the way God takes fallen humanity—sinful, depraved, alienated, lost human beings—and brings them back into His purpose, back into His Zion, back into the realization of the purpose that was within His heart from the beginning.
Does that not make you worship God? I find my heart in tremendous wonder that God never gave us up, but found a way to take rebellious people like you and me. We were trouble before we were saved; my goodness, we have been some trouble since!
Yet He has given Himself and opened up the way. God has not been diverted or deflected from His original purpose by one single iota. The fall has not destroyed the purpose of God, hidden it, or defeated God. It has become an added glory.
Now we have people who have been plunged into sin and darkness, brought under the powers of darkness, delivered from the powers of darkness, and transferred into the kingdom of His dear Son. Only He could have done that.
I said that in every truly born-again believer, right at the moment of new birth, the ways to Zion are implanted. Perhaps you do not quite understand what I am saying, but I mean this: the day you were born from above, the day you were saved, whether you knew it or not, something in you opened up to a new creation.
Something in you opened up to a new world. Something in you opened up to the eternal purpose of God. Maybe it was lost very quickly because you were never taught, never helped, or through your own sin and disobedience. But it is there.
Listen to Psalm 87:
His foundation is in the holy mountains.
The Lord loveth the gates of Zion
More than all the dwellings of Jacob.
Glorious things are spoken of thee,
O city of God.
Then it says:
I will make mention of Rahab and Babylon as among them that know Me;
Behold, Philistia, and Tyre, with Ethiopia:
This one was born there.
Where? This one was born in Zion. And again:
Yea, of Zion it shall be said,
This one and that one was born in her;
And the Most High Himself will establish her.
The Lord will count, when He writeth up the peoples,
This one was born there.
Dear child of God, are you a real child of God, born of God? When God writes up the peoples, when He counts, when He takes stock, He will say: “This one was not born in the United States; this one was born in Zion. That one was not born in the United Kingdom; that one was born in Zion.”
For Him, it is of paramount importance where they were born. Are they of the earth only, or have they been born of Zion?
This is exactly what the apostle Paul says in Galatians 4:26:
But the Jerusalem that is above is free, which is our mother.
Dear child of God, did you hear that? You have a mother, and your mother is Jerusalem. Jerusalem is your mother. You have been born a free man, a free woman. You have not been born under law, under bondage. You have been born free because you have been born of Jerusalem.
Psalm 87 concludes:
They that sing as well as they that dance shall say,
All my fountains are in thee.
Many Christians feel that “thee” refers to God, but it is feminine in Hebrew and refers to Jerusalem. “All my fresh springs are in Jerusalem.” That is not so surprising, because this Zion is Christ.
Where is the dwelling place of God? Christ. Who is the dwelling place of God? Christ. Who is the temple of the living God? Christ said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
He is the house of God. He is the Zion of God.
Turn to Deuteronomy 12:5:
But unto the place which the Lord your God shall choose out of all your tribes,
To put His name there, even unto His habitation shall ye seek,
And thither thou shalt come.
Again, in verse 11:
Then it shall come to pass that to the place
Which the Lord your God shall choose,
To cause His name to dwell there,
Thither shall ye bring all that I command you.
God told the children of Israel that they were not to bring their offerings, sacrifices, tithes, or anything else to any hill or city of their own choosing. They were to come to the place where He had caused His name to dwell—His home.
Take that over into the new covenant. Where is the place where God has caused His name to dwell? Jesus. Is that not so?
And in none other is there salvation:
For neither is there any other name under heaven,
That is given among men, wherein we must be saved.
Listen again to Matthew 18:20:
For where two or three are gathered together in My name,
There am I in the midst of them.
One of the most wonderful phrases in the New Testament is the phrase in Christ. It explains everything. In Christ we have salvation. In Christ we have the power of life. In Christ we find the power of God, the exceeding greatness of His power.
In Christ we have all wisdom and knowledge. In Christ we have all the resources of God. In Christ there is everything: all the blessings of God, all the provision of God, all the life of God, all the gifts of God. All in Christ.
What does it mean to be in the name? Many people think it is a little charm added to the end of a prayer. I am not against saying, “In the name of the Lord Jesus,” at the end of prayer, but let us understand what we are saying.
Do we use it as a magical charm, or do we understand it? When we say we meet in the name, when we gather into His name, it means that we are in Him. We are members of His body.
My name is Lamb, and my body shares that name. My hand, my foot, every member of my body acts in the name of Arthur Lamb because it is part of my body.
In the same way, the Lord has brought us into Christ and made us members of Christ and members one of another. We have become members of the body of the Lord Jesus. The name of Jesus has been named upon earth.
In the early days, part of the understanding of baptism was that the name of the Lord was named upon you. In Christ: everything. Out of Christ: nothing.
In Christ, joy; out of Christ, misery. In Christ, power; out of Christ, paralysis. What an epitaph for much Christian work. So much of it is outside of Christ. It is done in the name of Christ, but it is not done in Christ.
Have you ever noticed the marvellous verse in Isaiah 8:14?
And He shall be for a sanctuary;
But for a stone of stumbling and for a rock of offence
To both the houses of Israel,
For a gin and for a snare to the inhabitants of Jerusalem.
And many shall stumble thereon, and fall, and be broken,
And be snared, and be taken.
What an extraordinary word. He is, for some people, a sanctuary; for others, a stone of stumbling. Either He is the house of God, the temple of God, the very habitation of God, or He becomes the wreckage of everything. You either fall over Him, or you find in Him the whole purpose of God.
Then Isaiah 28:16:
Therefore thus saith the Lord God,
Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone,
A tried stone,
A precious cornerstone of sure foundation:
He that believeth shall not be in haste.
What is the point of having a foundation if you do not have a building? What is the point of having a cornerstone? It belongs in a building.
The whole point is this: He is the sanctuary of God. He is foundation, cornerstone, and headstone. All the stones are fashioned out of the same material; His nature and life come from Him.
This is what the Father has called you to. If you have been saved, your feet have been put upon a sure foundation. But do you know it?
You may say, “I know that the Lord Jesus is my only salvation. He is my foundation.” My dear friends, I am so thankful to hear you say that. But what is the point of having a foundation if there is no building?
Supposing we announced a conference in Richmond at the University of Richmond and invited everyone to meet on the foundation of the auditorium. We all come and sit on a concrete foundation—no seats, no walls, no roof, no light. You would think we needed to see a doctor.
Everyone knows that a foundation is the beginning. If you say, “I am building a house,” the first thing is the foundation, then the cornerstone, then the whole building. The whole point of a foundation is that there is to be a building.
The apostle Peter takes this up in 1 Peter 2:4-5:
Unto whom coming, a living stone, rejected indeed of men,
But with God elect, precious,
Ye also, as living stones, are built up a spiritual house,
To be a holy priesthood,
To offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
Then Paul says in Ephesians 2:20-22:
Being built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets,
Christ Jesus Himself being the chief cornerstone;
In whom each several building, fitly framed together,
Groweth into a holy temple in the Lord;
In whom ye also are builded together
For a habitation of God in the Spirit.
Here we are talking about the eternal purpose of God. What was that purpose? It was to have a home: to bring people born of His Spirit, saved by His grace, washed in the blood of the Lamb, to that foundation which is Jesus Christ; to relate them to one another in the Lord Jesus Christ; to build them together; to cause them to grow into a holy temple in the Lord.
At the end of the Bible, we have the Zion of God. We have the wife of the Lamb, the bride. She has made herself ready. Is that not wonderful?
She has not waited for something merely to come upon her while she lay passive. She has appropriated what is hers in the Messiah. She has taken of the grace of God. She has drawn upon the resources of God in Christ. She has experienced the unsearchable riches of Christ.
She is made of gold, precious stones, and pearl. All three come through incredible trials and suffering.
The pearl, as you know, is made by a little bit of grit falling into the softest part of the oyster. All the energies within the life of that creature are exerted to expel the grit. It puts a little coat around it, then another, and another, and another—and a pearl is produced.
The gates of this Zion are all pearl. Thorns, messengers of Satan, may be given by God to some of His choicest servants, so that all the resources and energy of God are exerted within them. Instead of the trial merely being expelled, it becomes a focal point of glory.
And the precious stone—where is it found? In treasures of darkness, down in the rock, deep down in the earth, formed by immense pressure and heat until these precious stones are made.
Does not God speak of the fellowship of His sufferings? Pearl, in my estimation, speaks of sovereign and inexplicable suffering. Some of God’s dear people are given problems that cannot be explained and that no deliverance ministry will ever deliver them from.
But it is because God, in His great love and mercy, is preparing gates. Gates are very important things in a city. When you have great walls, they are the only way in and the only way out.
The foundations are also important, and the foundations speak of the fellowship of His sufferings. How few believers are ready to know the fellowship of His sufferings. They are ready for the power of His resurrection; they want to know Him and the glories of His grace. But to know the fellowship of His sufferings, they shrink back.
Yet we have to go that way if we are to be part of the bride.
Then there is gold: the life of Christ, the life of His nature, refined through trial, until it comes out pure as crystal. You have never seen gold like that.
In the old days, goldsmiths would refine the precious metal until they could see their face clearly reflected in it. When all the dross was boiled away and they saw their face perfectly reflected, they took the gold or silver from the crucible.
That is what our Lord does with us. Every step forward in Him is put to the test. If it really is the Lord, and if we really mean business, and if we have said somewhere along the pilgrimage, “Lord, I want to be in Thy Zion. I want to be part of the bride. I want to be a true overcomer, not one of some superior elite, but a servant of Thine,” then God puts every new step forward to the test.
He does it so that the gold of Christ’s nature may be pure. God never puts a thing through the fire that He knows will not come through.
Now I think we should finish. But where is Zion built up? It is all very well talking about these wonderful things and saying, “Is it not marvellous? We have been called by the grace of God, born of Jerusalem, the mother of us all—the Jerusalem which is above.”
It is amazing to me that the Bible ends with a marriage. No other book in the whole world of so-called scripture ends in a marriage. Only the Bible ends with a marriage.
We see the Lamb and the wife of the Lamb going out, joined together for ever into eternity, and we do not know what they are going to do. Is that not marvellous?
Some people tell me they are going to be bored in eternity. I have heard young students say, “I would be bored—people draped around in heavenly nighties, playing harps, floating around on damp clouds, singing in an eternal choir. Who wants to go there?”
I do not think heaven is like that at all. I am quite sure there is going to be praise to the Lamb, a tremendous hallelujah chorus, and much that will enrapture us in worship beyond anything we have known or can conceive.
But I do not believe God wants us simply to stand around Him singing an eternal hallelujah chorus. God is not like that. Look at the heavens He has created. Look at the earth. Look at this little planet, apart from the other universes beyond this great universe of ours.
God is creative. When God had in His heart this purpose of Zion, He did not simply end there. It was like a marriage. He said, “This is the beginning.” He has created and watched over His bride, brought her to the marriage, and then they go out to fulfil His purpose.
We do not know what His purpose will be. It is wonderful that the Lord confines us to the essentials. Do not worry about what you will wear or whether you will recognize one another. Do not bother your head about it.
The thing that matters is that you will be with Him. You will be joined to Him. If you have been enraptured by your salvation down here on earth, if you have known ecstasies of the Spirit’s work in this pilgrimage, what will it be when you are no longer engaged, but married?
You are only engaged. You may have been christened, confirmed, and everything else, but however far you have gone, you are only engaged to the Lord. You have not yet got married.
If the love of the Lord, the knowledge of the Lord, and the experience of the Lord are so glorious now, what will it be when we are married? I cannot wait to get there.
Do not wonder that the angels are blessed to be invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb. In one sense, they are not jealous of us, but they envy us. They look at fallen, rebellious, difficult people and say, “At last, God did it.”
For we do not know what eternity will be, except that we know that God is not going to stop creating, for God is the Creator. He has not finished creating.
That is why the Old Testament speaks of trees clapping their hands, hills singing for joy, and valleys rejoicing. The whole earth has been bound in corruption and limited to cycles of production because of fallen man. But once redeemed man is joined to God in the marriage of the Lamb, the whole natural creation will burst out of its bondage.
We do not know what it will be like. But every time I look at a tree, I think, “That was not what God finally intended.” It is bound in a cycle of reproduction. One day it will all burst out of it. What will it be like? It is marvellous enough as it is.
I hope that you begin to get a thirst. But where is this Zion going to be built? It is all very well to speak of these wonderful things: that we are the bride, that this was in the heart of God from the beginning, that He saved you, that you have come to Mount Zion, that Zion is in you, and that He planted the highways in your heart.
But, my dear friend, if the highways are in your heart, are you walking them? Are you walking them? Do you know something of the songs of Zion in your heart?
Have you seen this purpose of God? Is the Spirit of God mastering you so that it becomes a priority for you, as with the apostle Paul, counting all things but loss that he might win Christ and be found in Him, pressing on toward the high calling of God in Christ Jesus?
Whether you are young or old, the point is this: Zion is not built in the never-never. It is not built up there in the air. It is built here on earth, where we live, in our localities.
It is there that God has to do something. We have to have vision. We have to be given understanding. We have to glimpse the purpose of God. Then we begin to feel lonely: “Where are my other brothers and sisters in the locality where I live? Where are my flesh and blood? Where are my friends? Where are the other living stones? Where is the building together of saints?”
Do we believe that, in the twinkling of an eye, this whole building of Zion will take place just like that? That does not discredit all that has gone before. In every age and generation there have been men and women who have lived fully up to the light God gave them, sometimes giving their lives for the Lord. Such are in the city.
But I cannot escape this simple thing, and with this I close. At the beginning of the book of Revelation, I see the risen, ascended, glorified Head of the church walking in the midst of seven local churches.
Whether you consider those churches to represent the whole church in this age, or whether you consider them representative of all churches, it remains the same: it is the church on earth, and He is walking in the midst of it.
Each of those churches is represented by a golden lampstand. It is not simply the church, because Jesus says to one of them, “I will remove thy candlestick out of its place.” The meetings may go on; Bible studies, evangelistic meetings, and everything else may continue, without anyone knowing that the lampstand has gone.
That is the tragedy of so much church life. We can continue with our programmes, our Bible studies, and our meetings without knowing that the lampstand has gone.
What is the lampstand? The lampstand is the testimony of Jesus. It is the essential heart of the matter. You can talk until you are blue in the face about the pattern, character, and truth of the church, but if the lampstand is gone, it means nothing.
You can have a New Testament structure and it can be as dead as a churchyard. In some cases, more dead. But there are seven lampstands, and to each of these churches comes the word of the Lord: “To him that overcometh will I grant this, or this, or this.”
When we come to the last two chapters of Revelation, we find the new Jerusalem, the city of God, coming down out of heaven, having the glory of God—the bride, the wife of the Lamb, made ready for her husband.
Then we hear the words again:
He that overcometh shall inherit these things;
And I will be his God, and he shall be My son.
That does not mean merely that he shall be My baby or My child. It means that he shall be My responsible son—one who can take over the business, one who can administer.
When you closely read Revelation 21 and 22, you find a wonderful thing. The Lamb is the lamp thereof. There is no need for sun or moon, for the glory of God lightens it, and the Lamb is the lamp thereof.
You have the light, which is the glory of God, and the Lamb is the lamp. What is the lampstand? The lampstand holds the lamp. What is it? It is the city. It is Zion. It is the lampstand that holds the Lamb, and it is the Lamb who holds the glory of God.
Therefore, I find a connection between that Zion which is to come and the church on earth in time and place. If I am to be one who comes to the throne of God, who comes to reign with Christ in the age to come and in eternity, I must first overcome down here.
Overcoming is seen in the context of being built together with my brothers and sisters; of knowing the oneness of the body, the oneness of Christ; of serving one another; of laying down our lives for one another.
It is not a question of opinions, fights, controversies, and all the rest of it, but of loving one another: laying down my life for you, and you laying down your life for me.
No one is going to become the bride of Christ who has not got the character of the Lamb. Have you ever heard of a wolf married to a lamb? No. The bride must herself be a lamb. She has the character of the Lamb, the nature of the Lamb. She has gone the same way as the Lamb.
So it must be with you and me. God’s way of doing this is often through one another. How does God shape you? Through your difficult brothers and sisters. How do you know what it is to be crucified? Through your difficult brothers and sisters.
Dear people come to me and say, “How can I be crucified?” I say, “Do not worry. Tell the Lord you want to be crucified, and your nearest and dearest will bang the nails through your hands and feet within hours.”
You do not have to worry about walking the way of crucifixion. Once you see that in Christ you will be crucified, and you are ready to walk that way, God will see that within hours you have the circumstances to fall into the ground and die.
And if you fall into the ground and die, you shall surely know resurrection.
So, dear people of God, here is God’s eternal purpose that I, in my poor way and with my poor words, have tried to define and paint. May it capture you. May it so capture you that you will never be the same again.
Oh, Father, if it has been Thy purpose from the beginning to bring us to Thyself into a union with Thyself, to make us, as it were, Thy Zion—that perfection of beauty out of which Thou dost shine forth—may everyone in this place, young and old, catch a glimpse of that purpose of Thine.
Bring a holy discontent into our lives with anything less, Lord, than Thy highest and Thy best. May Thy Spirit work in giving us that wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus, that, Lord, we shall be apprehended by Thee this night in a deeper, fuller, more complete way than ever before.
O Lord, make us children of Zion. For we ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus.