On Thursday evening last, we were occupied with Psalm 51, and the Lord gave us a very precious word. The brother was very greatly helped. We shall not forget it.
I am sure he will not feel that I am trying to improve upon what was said when I bring you back to that psalm this morning for a few minutes. That is not my thought at all. But before Thursday, and since, one part of the psalm has been emphasized in me, and I feel that it is the Lord’s message for us.
It is in Psalm 51:6:
Behold, Thou desirest truth in the inward parts.
I think that, in a very real sense, that is the heart of the psalm. If we were able to recognize the meaning of those words, just exactly what they signify, we should see that everything in this psalm, and in the wider context of human experience with God, is centred there. It is the key to everything.
We can, I am sure, say that this touches the deepest depth that ever man could touch in the mercy of God.
In Psalm 1, we have the blessedness of the man who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, and so on. Well, he is a blessed man indeed.
In Psalm 32, we have the blessedness of the man whose sin is covered, whose iniquity is pardoned. I take it that this is the provision made in sacrifice, and blood, and priesthood, for the man who sins. Well, it is a blessing to find that provision at hand.
But here, in Psalm 51, we are altogether outside any of the ordinary provision. Perhaps you have not recognised that David’s sin, which was behind this psalm, was altogether outside the provision of the law of Moses. There was no provision in that whole sacrificial system for this sin.
The sin that David committed was the sin unto death. It was blood-guiltiness, the sin unto death. The only thing that the law had to say for sinning in this way was death.
So we are altogether outside the provision of the law here. Thus comprehensive and detailed as that provision was, it made no provision. God has got to make some special provision here.
We were reminded on Thursday that it is in that special provision—the sacrifice of His Son—something far bigger than any Jewish sacrifice, altar, or priesthood; something reaching deeper down than anything that ever was known in Israel. It is in that that we find David saved from death.
He knew the death of his sin. He cried, as you know here, that he might be delivered from blood-guiltiness. Well, this is the deepest point to which any man can come.
There are different degrees of God’s dealings with the soul. He deals with us upon one level in a certain way, and then we go into a deeper depth, and He has got to deal with us in another and deeper way.
Then we go deeper, and He has got to make a provision and deal with us in a still deeper way. I am not saying that it is in the ordering and will of God that we should go right down to these depths. But here is a wonderful thing: God is going to touch bottom in this matter of man’s sin, man’s need, and His own grace.
He will touch bottom—that is, He will go to the deepest depths. When David says, “Thou desirest truth in the inward parts,” he is going beyond the law, which was all outward. There is no mere formalism about this, no mere Jewish ritual, no mere outward observance of rites and ceremonies.
Oh, this has got to go right into the innermost being: “in the inward parts.” God works toward that. God is ever working toward the most inward parts. Do you recognise that? Do you understand what He is doing with us?
Oh, He will meet us in blessing on a certain level as we walk before Him, like the man in Psalm 1. He will meet us with His gracious provision when we transgress, trespass, and fail. He will meet us there in grace. But God is going to pursue this matter to the most inward place of our being and register there His work of grace and redemption.
David did not come to that until he reached the profoundest, the deepest place: our need, our failure, our conscience, weakness, and worthlessness. Then he cries, “It is not enough to please God in ordinary ways. It is not enough to observe the ritual of the law, and go to the ceremonies, and carry out all that which is external. God desires truth in the inward parts.”
Why? Why? Because truth is a major feature and constituent of the divine nature. God is called the God of truth—the God of truth.
Jesus Christ, the second Person of the Godhead, called Himself the Truth: “I am the truth.” “For this purpose came I into the world, that I might bear witness unto the truth.” The Holy Spirit is described as the Spirit of truth: “When He, the Spirit of truth, is come.”
The Godhead—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is characterised by this one feature: truth. God desires, and has set His heart upon having, people who are partakers of the divine nature. So He is working ever more deeply toward this end. What is true of Himself shall be true of His children, those begotten of Him, that they should be true sons of God in this sense.
Satan is described as the liar, the father of lies. For that reason, all untruth is an abomination to God. God has consigned all liars to the lake of fire. He has excluded from the New Jerusalem everything that maketh a lie. God hates everything that is not true—not true right through and through like Himself. He hates it. He must have, He desires, truth in the inward parts.
The interference of Satan with God’s creation, with man, resulted in man becoming something false. Man is a misrepresentation of God’s mind, and he is a deceived creature. “The god of this age,” says Paul, “hath blinded the minds of the unbelieving.” Man is a distinctly blinded creature.
Now you see how large a matter this is, and one is hard pressed to know what to say and what not to say about it. But let us dwell for a moment upon this clause: “the inward parts.”
You will detect in this psalm that this runs right through. Here it is: “in the inward parts”; “Create in me a clean heart”; “Renew a right spirit within me”; “a broken spirit and a contrite heart Thou wilt not despise.”
You see, it is all this innermost realm of things that has now arisen as the real need—the real need. No more deception, no more mockery, no more make-believe, no more going on as though it were all right when it is not all right.
No more using external means to cover over inward falseness. No more going to meetings, saying prayers, and joining in the whole system when the inward parts are not right before God.
The inward part—seeing that we are what we are by nature now—represents our reconstitution. Anything that does not minister to that is false in itself. Any system of religion that just puts on from the outside and covers over the inner life by mere rite and ritual is false. It is not true.
The work of God is to reconstitute human nature. That, of course, involves two things. On the one side, it involves writing down—breaking down.
If you know anything about God’s dealings with lives which come into His hands, there is undoubtedly a large place for that: a progressive breaking down, getting to the root of things, and undeceiving us.
If we have any illusions about ourselves, they will all be gone when God has done with us. If we are governed by any kind of falsehood or lie about ourselves, our position, or our worth, when God has done with us, that will all be gone. He is going to break us down until we see ourselves as an unclean thing, with all our righteousness as filthy rags.
So He will bring us down, and He does. But there is the other side, of course, all the time, for God is not only and always negative. There is the constructive work: bringing us to the place where anything that is false, anything that is not absolutely transparent, true, straight, and clear, is hateful to us.
More and more, our inner man revolts against our own falsehood. An exaggeration comes back on us at once with a conviction of wrong. Any false statement hits us hard, and we know we have not spoken the truth.
Oh, it is a tremendous thing to get into the hands of the Holy Spirit for this reconstituting of our entire nature, until, like God, the one thing that we hate is anything that is false. “I hate,” said David, “every false way.” We must come there, but we must be great lovers of the truth.
This is going to pursue us everywhere. It will pursue us into our own life within ourselves, that we are not deceiving ourselves at all. Before God, we know exactly what God thinks about us, and we know where we stand in the light.
It will pursue us into our social life, and all our social lies and make-believes will have to come under the light of God. Oh, what a tremendous amount of falsehood and make-believe there is in the social realm.
Yes, our social economy is built up very largely on lies. What about all the makeup? Is it not to make out that you are something that you are not—to give a semblance of something that is not true?
You see, the whole social life is like this: a fabric of untruth. We have many ways of saying things that really are not true. The friendly lie.
It will pursue us into our business: a lie that gets a good sale or a good buy—the commercial lie. And so, through and through, God will pursue this matter.
Forgive me, dear friends, but it is a very, very important thing with God. If God does hate that which is untrue, and desires truth in the inward parts, how can He bless where there is anything false of any kind at all? His eyes see.
Well, He has got to reconstitute us, and that is what the Spirit of truth does. This is a time-work. Indeed, it is a lifelong work—a lifelong work. I think this thing comes more to light and becomes more intense the further on you go.
The Lord lets you off with a lot of things as spiritual infants, as we do with children. We know they are children. We do not take too much notice of certain things which we know are not quite right, or not at all right.
God is very patient and very tender to bring us on. He would not come right in with all the fullness of the exactness of His nature too soon. He spreads it over a whole lifetime.
The nearer we come to the Lord, the closer we walk with Him, the more meticulous the Holy Spirit is over this matter of truth. Closer are His dealings with us. It is very true.
You see, perfecting truth in the fear of the Lord—perfecting. The nearer we get to the end, perhaps the more stringent will be the Lord’s dealings with anything false in our life.
It is a time matter, but God is very faithful. He is very faithful, and He does not let things pass. Do we want Him to? Well, it is not comfortable to say yes, but it is good that He should be faithful with every inconsistency, every contradiction, every false word, in the inward parts.
That carries the matter deeper than our own natural moral life. I am not talking about morals now. It is right to be honest. It is right to have integrity. It is right to be straight. It is right to be true, naturally and humanly. But I am not talking about that.
This thing goes deeper than what we call common honesty. It is deeper than our natural moral life at its best, for the simple reason that by nature we have not God’s conceptions, God’s tenor, or God’s thoughts about being.
God’s thoughts are very different from ours. We would very often allow what God would never allow. He has a different point of view about things altogether. We judge in one way, and God judges in another. It is necessary for us to come to God’s standpoint about these things.
Oh, we would say, “There is no harm in that.” What does the Lord say about it? “Oh, there is no wrong in that. Look at so-and-so.” And we take our standard, perhaps, from other people.
We are prone to do that: point to some outstanding figure in the work of God, in whose life there was a certain thing, and take that one as the model to be copied. Then we say, “Oh, there is no harm in it. Look at so-and-so.”
I have known lives and ministries to be ruined on that very principle. No, no, friends: walk before Me, not before any human model, not before any human standard. Do not reason like that: “There is no harm in it; so-and-so does it. It is quite a common practice.” No, no—walk before Me.
We have got to get this in the spirit. The inward man is deeper than our best moral standard. Otherwise, there is no point in being in the Bible at all. If our moral standards can rise to God’s satisfaction, why must we be so handled and reconstituted?
It is deeper than our intellect and our reason. You cannot, by reason or intellect, arrive at God’s standard at all—not at all. Oh, do not think that ever, by any method of reasoning, you are going to reach God’s standard. Never will.
Here it is only by the revelation of the Holy Spirit. Christ has got to be revealed in our hearts by the Spirit. There is no point in Jesus saying, “When He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He shall guide you into all the truth,” if we could get there by our own intelligence. Not at all.
It must come by the Spirit’s revelation of Christ in our hearts, in the inward parts. This is something spiritual. God is Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship in spirit and truth. Spirit and truth go together. Only what is spiritual, what is of God, is truth—only that.
The apostle Paul had a great intellect, as everybody knows, and he had a very high standard of moral life. But he was an utterly deceived man before his conversion.
“I verily thought with myself that I ought to do many things contrary.” It was a matter of conscience with him. Conscientious! “As touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.” There is a moral standard, an intellectual standard, and a conscientious standard—but all wrong, all wrong; mistaken, deceived.
No, that is not the way. It is only by the work of the Holy Spirit Himself in us, changing us—completely changing us.
Maybe common honesty and sincerity will be the way along which God can come. I am quite sure that if we are not going to be honest and straight with God, He is not going to meet us. But that will not get us there.
He may require the gangway across, so to speak, of meaning business with Him and being thoroughly honest before Him. But let us not think that any sincerity of ours can ever bring us to be partakers of the divine nature. Not at all.
“Thou desirest truth in the inward parts”—in the inward parts, the deepest realm of our being, in our spirit.
Well, I think that is all I dare take time to say on this matter this morning. But we ought to leave it at the point where we do recognise that God has provided for this in sending the Holy Spirit: “When He, the Spirit of truth, is come.”
It is all a matter of the Holy Spirit as Lord within us, having His place as absolute Lord over intellect, over our own moral pride and self-satisfaction.
Oh, let me come back where I started. The Holy Spirit will take this thing right down. Thank God! Thank God! Oh, what are you hoping in? What are you hoping in? Something in yourself—a man of Psalm 1?
Or are you hoping in the law, the ritual, the ceremonies, the sacrifices—a man of Psalm 32? You get God’s mercy and grace there, if you can satisfy Him on either of those grounds at all, as a blessing. But God is not going to stop there, and thank God He does not.
Do I say too terrible a thing when I say that God will bring us to the place of complete despair on all other grounds but His mercy, in order that He might reach His end?
His end is His own satisfaction in us: that no flesh should glory in His presence; that he that glorieth shall glory in the Lord.
So, ours is a mercy and a grace boundless—beyond, beyond anything that ever was provided for in the old economy. It is provided for in Jesus Christ.