We continue in the matter that has been laid on our hearts for this time: the servant of the Lord.
We are gathered around that little fragment in Isaiah’s prophecies, chapter 41: “Behold, My servant.”
We have seen the law of service as being central to everything in this universe. This universe exists to minister to God.
We have seen that this law was established at the creation of this world and of man, when immediately upon his being constituted, he was given a trust: to hold everything, develop everything, for God. A ministry; a trust.
And that law, being established at the beginning, you see runs right through the Bible, and at last is seen in the eternal state, where “His servants shall serve Him; and they shall see His face.” A long story of service and ministry to the pleasure and glory of God.
Then we have seen the method and means of service. We saw a nation chosen and separated particularly, specifically, to minister to the pleasure of God. The Lord said to Pharaoh, “Let My people go, that they may serve Me.” A whole nation.
At the centre of the nation was to be the embodiment of this universal principle, and to lead the nation into it. Yet we saw that that nation, elect for that purpose, as a whole failed—failed sadly and terribly.
Then God moved in, in these prophecies of Isaiah, with a large section in which that Servant is introduced and presented—the One who completely and perfectly fulfilled, in every respect, that law of service, that satisfaction to God: the Servant of the Lord, the One referred to in our passage, “Behold, My servant.”
Having foreshadowed and predicted that, in the time of the whole nation’s failure, the next movement would be to deposit the principle of service in a remnant, we come upon very many references in these prophecies and elsewhere which show them as God’s repository of the service of the Lord. That is, they take character from Him and carry forward this great responsibility, privilege, and trust of ministering to the Lord.
That is the Old Testament: a figure of the divine thought. Passing into the New Testament, that nation is set aside; that Servant, not now in prediction but in presence, is here on the spot, fulfilling His ministry, His servanthood, and perfecting it.
Then there is the bringing in of the nation to take the place of that nation which is set aside, fulfilling the word of the Lord: “The kingdom of God shall be taken away from you, and shall be given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.” A new nation is brought in. Peter calls it “a holy nation”; that is, the Church.
And then, too soon, there is repetition: a general failure, and a repetition of the Lord’s methods—an appeal to those within the general body who will form for Him this remnant of this dispensation, to take up and carry forward and represent the principle, the law, of God’s satisfaction and God’s pleasure, for which everything was created.
Now, that has occupied us for quite a time in this conference. We must not take more time in retrospect. This afternoon we come back to Isaiah’s prophecies, to a part which you may think has been left out, but it is a cameo of this whole subject.
I refer to Isaiah 6. It is so familiar to you, and yet I feel quite sure that the Lord wants something said about this at this time.
In the year that king Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and His train filled the temple.
Above Him stood the seraphim: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.
And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of His glory.
And the foundations of the thresholds were moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke.
Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.
Then flew one of the seraphim unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar:
And he touched my mouth with it, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin forgiven.
And I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us? Then I said, Here am I; send me.
And He said, Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not.
Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn again, and be healed.
Then said I, Lord, how long? And He answered, Until cities be waste without inhabitant, and houses without man, and the land become utterly waste,
And the Lord have removed men far away, and the forsaken places be many in the midst of the land.
And if there be yet a tenth in it, it shall again be eaten up: as a terebinth, and as an oak, whose stock remaineth, when they are felled; so the holy seed is the stock thereof.
I tell you, this is a cameo—a cameo of the whole subject. In this we have the whole history of the nation embodied.
We shall try, as quickly as possible, with so much ground to cover, to see the outline, at least, of what is here. First of all, then, we are in the presence of the tragedy of a great epoch.
The reign of King Uzziah had been one of the most glorious in Israel—outstanding indeed, a very bright spot in a long, dark, troubled period. Uzziah had come to great eminence and great glory.
But, like humanity so commonly, he was unable to carry the responsibility of prosperity. His heart was lifted up; and when that happens, that is the beginning of the end of glory. Disaster is not far away.
In the uplifted heart of his pride, Uzziah presumed upon his heritage, his position, and the blessing of God. He presumed upon it and took the holy things into his own hands.
You know the story. While he was doing it, he was suddenly smitten with leprosy, went out from the presence of the Lord, and for the rest of his life lived in the seclusion of a leper, and then died.
That is the story of the nation. The nation had come to a place of great eminence among the nations—great prosperity, power, riches, and influence—and then began to presume upon it, to take it for granted, to think that because there was so much blessing and trust from the Lord, nothing mattered. “Do as you like.” And the hands of men took hold of the holy things to use them for their own ends.
That is the story of Israel. I suggest to you, dear friends, that it is very largely the story of the Church.
We are always looking back upon the great days of the Church; and today, this day commemorating Pentecost, we look back to those great days. What days they were! What power, what blessing, the presence of God so manifestly in their midst.
And then the whole thing was taken into the hands of men, manipulated and changed, and used for human glory. There was the introduction of a whole system of people with high-flown names and titles, with men coming into prominence; and the Church became a sporting ground for the expression of human glory.
The days of the Church’s blessing waned. Perhaps we say too much if we say it was smitten with leprosy, but nevertheless: tragedy at the end of a glorious epoch, just as with Uzziah.
It was at that point—at that point—that God intervened with Isaiah, and through Isaiah with the Servant of the Lord. In Isaiah himself, in his experience and history, very much was true of the case of the great Servant, his Master, our Lord Jesus. That is why I call it a cameo of the whole situation.
If you will accept what I have said as true—and I think it is—it called for, demanded, a heavenly intervention. When the earthly order had run into tragedy and had to be left so largely without its primal and pristine glory, Isaiah became the figure, the type, of heavenly intervention at such a time.
The fullness of that tragedy was reached in Israel when heaven intervened with the greatest Prophet, the Lord Jesus. Heaven broke in, in a great reaction against that tragic state, and produced the Servant of God to deal with it. The Lord Jesus came at a time like that, a time of terrible tragedy among the people of God.
“The year that King Uzziah died”—you could put that in various other ways: in such-and-such a time, when such-and-such conditions obtained—“I saw the Lord.”
Against the dark background of failure, breakdown, and tragedy, a heavenly vision is given. Let me underline one word: a heavenly vision. Here is a transition from the earthly to the heavenly. Heaven takes charge. Heaven breaks in. And that is the way of recovery, the way of salvation.
First of all, “I saw the Lord high and lifted up.” High and lifted up.
You know that this is a phrase used immediately in the context of the Lord’s Servant in Isaiah 53: “My servant shall deal wisely, He shall be exalted and lifted up.” It is very impressive that John, writing his Gospel, refers to Isaiah 6 in John 12:41 and says, “These things said Isaiah, because he saw His glory; and he spake of Him.” Who was it that Isaiah saw, high and lifted up? John says it was Jesus.
That is always the beginning of a great change in the situation. It is always God’s new beginning: to see Him high and lifted up. Uzziah, and all that he represents, may have fallen like a fallen idol; but there is One high and lifted up to save the situation.
The exaltation of the Lord Jesus means, first, that a work has been accomplished and finished upon which the future rests with certainty. It is finished. He was not high and lifted up, exalted and glorified, until He had finished His servant-work; and upon that finished work the whole future was founded.
His universal authority was established: “All authority hath been given unto Me in heaven and on earth.” He took His place at the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens. His name is enthroned above all rule and authority and every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in that which is to come.
From that, God begins again. He did with Isaiah. Wherever there is to be recovery, even though it may be in a remnant, however imperfectly, nevertheless there is some recovery to which the Lord returns with not a little pleasure. “My peculiar treasure,” He calls the remnant that issues from this vision of the Lord high and lifted up.
And, dear friends, that is true. If it is as true of the Church as it was of Israel, that there has been loss and tragedy, and those first glorious conditions have faded—as everybody recognises and acknowledges—then God will begin as He has always begun: by someone or some people, a remnant if you like, a corporate person, getting a new conception and apprehension of the greatness of Christ.
The only way—the only way—but it is the sure way; it is God’s way: the greatness of Christ, the overlordship of Christ, the absolute supremacy of Christ. Christ over all, and in all, and through all: high and lifted up.
That is God’s method through the whole compass of the dispensations. It is His method with every individual life. If you have fallen into tragedy, if the earlier glow and glory of Christian experience has faded into shadows or even darkness, if there is tragedy in your own spiritual life, what will save you? Only a new apprehension of the greatness of Christ.
Turn your eyes from your tragedy, from yourself, from your desires, from things around, and lift them up to see Him high and lifted up—great enough to cope with your tragedy, and great enough to cope with the tragedy of a universe as well as of the Church.
“I saw the Lord high and lifted up, and His train filled the temple.” In the heavenly vision, things passed from the tragic temple in Jerusalem to the temple in heaven. Isaiah saw a heavenly temple substituting for the earthly thing which had failed: a heavenly house of God.
This is the second movement in the way of recovery. Notice how true to principle it is according to the New Testament: first, always first, the greatness of Christ—the exaltation of Christ. That is always the beginning. Then, the greatness of the Church, the greatness of the house of God, the greatness of that conception and reality of a place of God’s dwelling.
But we know that the earthly thing is in tragedy, and you are not going to rebuild that. You are not going to recover an earthly thing. The Church now is a heavenly thing, a heavenly reality.
You and I get onto heavenly ground if we are to be a true expression of the Church—its unity and its life. Touch this earth, and you touch everything that divides, everything that brings strife, everything that contradicts that divine idea. Get off the earthly ground of things and people, onto the heavenly ground, and at once a new kind of Church comes into evidence. It is a heavenly thing.
First, the Head of the Church; and then, the Church. First, the Lord high and lifted up; and then the temple of the Lord, which He fills. The earthly is substituted by the heavenly.
Lord, deliver us from our earthly ideas, our earthly limitations, our earthly conceptions, and our earthly bondages. Oh, how contradictory the earthly church is to the Church according to God’s mind.
“And His train filled the temple”—His skirts filled the house. This is symbolic language. Here, in this heavenly temple or house, Christ is all-pervading and all-inclusive. He fills all things. There is no room for anyone or anything else.
His filling His house means that there is no place for anything else—persons or things. There is no place for the gods of this world. He is, in the eternal counsels of God, appointed and destined to fill all things; and the first place of His filling is His own house, the Church.
That is very testing, is it not? Men have come into the house of God, and things have been brought in. There is very much today that corresponds to the condition in the days when the Lord was here, concerning which He could repeat His words: “Take these things hence; they belong not in My Father’s house.”
Take these things hence. They do not belong to My Father’s house. They are not in keeping with the place of the dwelling, the habitation, of the Lord. Take them out.
This heavenly house is filled with Christ. The garments or skirts are only symbolic—God Himself in His fullness, all-pervading—so that man is deposed and has no place there as man, just as Uzziah was driven out. The priests took him and drove him from the temple.
Room has to be made for the Lord in His heavenly house.
Then the next thing in the vision—the heavenly vision—is the heavenly servants and their service. They are called the seraphim: “Above Him stood the seraphim.” Heavenly servants fulfilling heavenly ministry.
Each had six wings, and the wings represent different features of their heavenly service. With two they covered, or veiled, their faces.
This service, which is going to bring God His satisfaction and reach His end and fulfil His purpose and be according to His original intentions, is carried out in a spirit of deep reverence, humility, and awe.
I suppose these seraphim were themselves beautiful and glorious beings. In other places you find that this is so. But whatever they were in themselves, they covered themselves in the presence of the Lord and in the service of the Lord. They hid themselves. They hid themselves.
That is very different, is it not, from a great deal of what is called Christian work? It is used to bring people into prominence. How many there are who uncover themselves in the work of the Lord, and you only see them—you encounter them; they are in view. But these, who fulfil the true heavenly ministry of God, cover themselves.
It is a spirit of deep reverence and humility. Then, with two, they covered their feet—the symbols of their goings, their walk, their work. This was all very much under cover, under government, and in subjection to that throne.
They are before the throne; they are in the presence of the holy God. All their ways, their walk, and their work are governed by this sense of holiness and reverence. They are not just running hither and thither, doing this and doing that according to their own whims, fancies, impulses, and ideas. It is all governed under the restraint of heaven.
They covered their feet. And with two they flew. Their flying was only at His behest; all their goings were in obedience to Him. They flew to do His will.
Their flying was very swift and very immediate. To discern intuitively His mind about any matter found them instantly ready to do it. This is the nature of the servant of the Lord: obedience, government, restraint, humility, reverence, and yet swiftness to do His will.
“And one cried unto another, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts.” What is that? I think that is the essence of everything—the essence of all their ministry, the essence of heavenly ministry.
When you get a look into heaven at any time in the Bible, what is it that you find going on in heaven? Worship. Worship. Unceasing worship.
That is the great thing that comes out in the consummation, in the Book of Revelation. At the end, in the consummation of the ages, God is in possession of the realisation of His purpose through the Lamb, and heaven is filled with worship. Worship, worship, worship. That is heavenly ministry.
What is worship? Worship, of course, is the service of the Lord, because worship is God having His rights—God having His rights. Everything comes back to the Lord; everything is drawn Godward. That is worship.
All things are held for Him and directed toward Him. He is the centre, and every stream flows toward Him. That is the meaning of worship, and that is the ultimate and supreme service: they worship the Lord.
Worship should characterise everything in our lives. Our homes should be held for the Lord, so that they become not merely places where we have five or ten minutes, or an hour or two, of prayer and worship. The whole thing should be for the Lord—all of it for the Lord.
Everything that we have should be a matter of worship; we hold it for God. Everything. The whole life should be Godward in every matter. That is service. That is servanthood: to see that God has His place and His rights, and comes into everything.
What you might expect, what we might expect, and what would suddenly happen if this came to us as a vision—if ours was an open heaven like this—is the servant’s undoing. “Woe is me! Woe is me!”
With all that could be said about that matter, let me sum it up by saying this: you will never, never be a servant of the Lord according to Jesus Christ, on His principle of service, until you have come very low at the feet of God.
Oh, how He honoured the Father—how He honoured the Father, ever and always and in all things. He was the servant of the Father’s honour and glory.
While it was never true of Him personally that He was a man of unclean lips, for us, dear friends, let there be no mistake about it: the way of servanthood is the way of the shattering of this self-life, the exposing of our own corruption.
Does that bring you some hope? I struggle to take some hope out of that. The Lord certainly does take infinite pains to shatter us, break us up, empty us, and bring us down to the dust. But if this has anything to say for our encouragement and comfort, it says that this is the way of service. It is the way of the greater service, the way of being able to minister to the Lord.
At the beginning, somewhere in this universe, there was one great glorious being who was a minister of God—the anointed cherub that covered. Glorious! But when he became self-important and thought to have the root of the matter in himself, and to be self-sufficient, he lost his ministry for all eternity. He lost his place in the glory.
That is ever true. Any pride, any self-esteem, self-sufficiency, self-confidence, self-centredness of any kind—any selfishness—is the way of ruined usefulness to God. No mistake about it.
So it was necessary, in the reaction of God to the situation, both in Israel and in the Church, that the vessel should come into being for His recovery purpose thoroughly emptied, weakened, and broken—brought to the place where there is nothing to say but, “Woe is me.”
That opens a prospect when we get there, as it did with Isaiah: the servant’s undoing first, and then, through the undoing, the anointing.
What I see here is the feature of the anointing: the live coal from the altar, blood-soaked with the sacrifice, alive with fire in it. Blood and the Spirit together—the twin symbols of cleansing and empowerment.
Back in the Levitical system it was like that, was it not? The blood and the fire of the altar were for the cleansing of the priesthood and for constituting them servants of God in divine service.
So this servant’s anointing meant that he had to know the power of the blood in his own experience. All true service to God has got to come from a personal knowledge of the virtue of the blood of the Lamb.
The tremendous effectiveness and efficacy of that blood have got to be deeply rooted, not in our doctrine and theory, but in our experience and history. Oh, the infinite value of the blood! And correspondingly, the infinite power of the Spirit.
We must know in our experience the power of God which purges and cleanses, but which also energises and vitalises. That is the servant’s equipment.
And when you get there, there is the servant’s call: “I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?”
That sounds very much like a contradiction of what I said last night: there is nothing voluntary about this service; it is compulsory. But it is not a contradiction. Think a little more below the surface.
No, this service is compulsory. It is the service of the bondslave, who has no option, no alternative, no right. Yet here it is, suspended, so to speak, in the air: “Whom shall I send?” Waiting for an answer, waiting for a volunteer.
See how everything had been very personal with this man up to this point. First of all, he had a name: Isaiah—“the salvation of the Lord.” His very name implied his ministry, a sense of destiny in the very title that he bore.
Perhaps most of you do not understand that, but some of you may. Right from your earliest days you had a sense—though you were not saved, though you did not know the Lord—that there was something more than just this life on this earth and in this world bound up with your existence.
I illustrate from my own experience. I do not mean to imply that I am any great servant, but I happen to be in the Lord’s service. I remember, when I was a little fellow, about five, six, or seven years of age, a relative took me to see one of those old Scottish divines, Dr. Blake, then the aged eighty-two-year-old minister of the great Wellington Church in Glasgow.
She took me into his study. He put his hand on my shoulder, drew me to his side, looked at me, and said, “My boy, when you grow up, you are going to be a minister.”
No such idea had ever occurred to me—to be a minister, when I was only six or seven years old. But I remember something stirred in me when he said that, and without knowing what I was saying, I said, “I would like to be.”
He put his hand on my head and said, “God bless you, my boy, and make you one of His servants.” I have had to say that the years which followed did not contain very much of the Lord’s service or the Lord’s glory, but that never left me. It held something in me like a sense of destiny.
Isaiah had something like that in his very name. And then, as I have said, all this was so personal to him. He had been given a heavenly vision; he had been touched by the live coal; he had heard the voice saying, “Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is forgiven.”
What more do you want to make a servant and convince a man that he is a man with a call? Before he has committed himself, he has been apprehended by God. There is nothing voluntary about that; that is all sovereign from God’s side.
What, then, about this suspended call: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Why this seeming optional element? It was not to make him Isaiah the prophet; that was all settled in the sovereignty of God. But look at what he had to do.
Read the last section of the chapter. My word! He was called to no popular work. He was called to nothing that was going to please him, nothing that was going to give him personal gratification.
No, this was no popular, no pleasant work to which he was called. Could ever a man be called to anything more heartbreaking and more distressing? “Go, tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not.”
How do you like that, minister? That is the failure of your ministry written over it from the beginning: “See ye indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes, lest they see, and hear, and understand.”
The Lord does not leave us in any doubt on this matter. If you are going to do Him true service, you are not going to be a popular preacher. You are not going to get anything out of this for yourself. You are going to have a difficult time. For the most part, they will not receive your word. They will not like what you say.
If tradition is true, Isaiah was the man who was sawn asunder in the end. Martyrdom lay in the line of this ministry, this service. Will you accept it? Not, “Will you be a prophet?” Not, “Will you be a servant?” But, “Will you serve Me, though you get nothing out of it?”
Perhaps that is where the voluntary element comes in. No, He is not going to force this honour; He looks for cooperation. He wants us to know what we are involved in. He wants us to face this thing squarely and look it right in the eyes.
This kind of ministry of the remnant, standing for God’s full thought, is not what all Israel will take kindly. Indeed, every kind and degree of rejection will be met. You will be despised and rejected of men.
The prophet entered into the experience of the One whom he saw—the One of Isaiah 53, “despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” Isaiah knew much about that.
Please, do not have any illusions about this. I know the idea of young men wanting to go into the ministry and the Lord’s work and become a great evangelist, or a great preacher, or something else great. Oh, that is not it.
The nearer you get to the heart of God, the more deeply you are baptised into the full thought and purpose of God, the smaller will be your following and clientele, the narrower will be your way of acceptance, and the less popular will your ministry be. That is what is said here.
And, dear friends, you may be thinking in personal terms only: a prophet. Here we are, a number of sisters, a number of brothers, a number of young people, and you may say, “All this may be right for a prophet like Isaiah, but where do I come into that?”
Have you not heard what I have been trying to say? This service and ministry is the ministry of a company as well as of individuals—a remnant. You can fulfil this very service and ministry, not individually and separately, but by reason of your relatedness to a remnant, to a body of the Lord’s people who are standing for Him in this way.
You fulfil it just as truly collectively, or corporately, as individually. And you will know this; you will meet all this by reason of your relationships and associations. You will meet it, not because of yourself, but because of that.
But I need say no more about that. Here we are: I think the situation is clearly defined. In servant and servanthood in Jesus Christ, all this was true of Him, the great Servant. And if the Master went that way, we, His lesser servants, surely must say, “Here am I; send me.”