I am going to repeat the three passages of Scripture around which our thoughts were gathered this afternoon, two of them in the prophecies of Jeremiah.
Jeremiah 17:12:
A glorious throne, set on high from the beginning,
Is the place of our sanctuary.
Then, from Jeremiah 1, the end of verse 5:
I have appointed thee a prophet unto the nations.
And in Acts 1:8:
Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Spirit is come upon you:
and ye shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea and Samaria,
and unto the uttermost part of the earth.
Prophet unto the nations; witnesses unto the uttermost part of the earth; a glorious throne, set on high from the beginning, is the place of our sanctuary.
We have already covered a considerable amount of laying down foundations for these meditations. The sum and substance of it all is that the call of God is a call into fellowship with Himself in a great purpose which has been in His heart from the foundation of the world.
That is the meaning of being the Lord’s. It is a fellowship call; it is a vocation call. It is, therefore, something very much more than a call to be saved. That is only the door into the fellowship and into the vocation.
Now, this evening, we are going on with that. I want to mention six parts of that whole matter of fellowship with God in vocation. And, of course, what I am saying, although without quoting the Scriptures, is fully based upon and supported by what the Word of God teaches.
Firstly, then, this world was made for and given by God to His Son as His possession and inheritance. That lies back of everything in history and in the Bible. It lies back of human life. It lies back of everything that the Bible contains.
God designed this world and created it for His Son, and gave it to Him as His inheritance.
Secondly, the world was stolen from God’s Son. Something that runs through the Bible and breaks out from the prophets again and again is that God has been robbed. God has been wronged. God has had His rights taken from Him.
God’s rights are vested in His Son, and that taking from God relates to the place of God and His Son in this world. It is not difficult to see that, on the one side, the big issue all along is just that: God has not got His place, and His rights have been taken from Him.
If we could comprehend the whole meaning of that one big Bible word, righteousness, we should see that it just comes back to this: righteousness relates to what is right where God Himself is concerned.
Righteousness and unrighteousness bear down upon this one issue: God having His place and being accorded His rights—His rights in heaven, His rights in creation, and His rights in man.
Well, those are things said which cover a lot of ground. But the point is that this world has been stolen from God’s Son—true, by man’s consent. However, for the moment, that is not the matter. The simple fact is that it is in wrongful hands. It is in hands to which it does not belong.
You know, God has written that deep and large in history. I wonder if you have ever wondered about one matter. You remember, in Genesis, God came to Abraham, made a covenant with him, and said:
Thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs,
and shall serve them;
and they shall afflict them four hundred years.
Before they were in existence, they were destined to Egyptian captivity and bondage. Or it was so sure that they would be. I have often asked myself, when reading the story of Joseph going into Egypt, then bringing his brethren there, and his aged father, and the seemingly happy times for the present that were theirs, why it was necessary for that to become a prison for them for those four hundred years.
And, as we know, an awful prison. We know how they cried and groaned by reason of their bondage under their taskmasters. Why?
Well, we know Joseph’s brethren were not a very good kind of people. They did not treat him very well. But for four hundred years? Was it for what they were, and what they should not have been—a heavy punishment? Why determine and foreknow, long before ever they were the bad men they were, before they were men at all, why must this long, terrible period be written in history?
Well, we may not, and I may not, understand the whole thing. But I do suggest this: God has written deep and large on the pages of history that this world is in the hands of a power to which it does not belong.
While they were there during that period, Israel did not belong to Egypt. God’s word was:
Let My people go.
They do not belong to you. You have no right over them. They belong to Me.
Now, perhaps we could find much better and fuller reasons for Israel later going into the seventy years’ captivity in Babylon. We might say they deserved that, only to read these prophecies of Jeremiah.
Nevertheless, there is another side. That people remained God’s people in Babylon. They did not belong to Nebuchadnezzar. They did not belong to Babylon. They were God’s people under wrongful and false government and control.
God has written this in history: there is that which is God’s which is under a false and wrongful government, control, and master. It is not where it ought to be—not in His hand.
It has been stolen from God, as truly as Pharaoh stole Israel and Israel’s rights, properties, and liberty; as truly as Nebuchadnezzar took the wealth of the temple, the city, and the people away.
So, in a fuller, deeper, and, of course, spiritual way—which is much, much worse than the temporal—this world, which belongs to God, has been stolen from God. It is not in His possession. God has been wronged. God’s Son has been robbed of His inheritance.
Thirdly, this world is, in the deepest sense, a lost world—a lost world, of course, firstly, to its Owner, its rightful Owner; lost to the purpose for which it was created; lost to its own rightful state: peace, joy, satisfaction.
It is lost to its essential unity, its integration. It is lost to that. That, of course, needs no argument or labouring. It is lost to its glory. It is a lost world. All in it, by nature, are lost. The nations are lost.
Now, of course, the Lord Jesus made it His business to lay great emphasis upon that fact, I believe, by parables, declarations, His work, and His Person, so as to make this quite clear to us all.
But the inheritance is lost. Yes, and it has been stolen. Remember the parable of the vineyard and the wicked husbandmen. They said:
This is the heir;
come, let us kill him,
and the inheritance shall be ours.
Oh, what a profound meaning the Lord Jesus had in speaking that parable.
We know all His other parables about lost things. We have dwelt mainly upon one side of them, but there is another side, you know. The one best known is the prodigal, so called. Well, we have gone around that prodigal, looking at him from every standpoint, so perhaps you think there is nothing more to be said.
But have you ever thought that he did not belong to the man to whom he hired himself out? He did not belong to that world into which he had gone, and he did not belong to the circumstances and conditions in which he found himself.
There was something in him all the time rising up in revolt, saying, “I do not belong here. This is not what I was made for. My whole being cries out, ‘I am in a false position. I am in a wrong position, where I ought not to be. I should not be in this.’”
If the coin or the sheep could speak—those lost things—they would have said the same thing: “I am not where I ought to be. Somewhere else—this is not what I was intended for.”
So when the Lord Jesus summed it all up and said:
The Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost.
He was touching the ultimate thing, the ultimate thing—not just man’s salvation in that elementary sense, but man’s salvation in its profoundest and uttermost sense: the recovery of that which has been lost to God’s Son, His inheritance.
Well, there is nothing, perhaps, new to you about that, but we are on the way. This world was made for and given by God to His Son. It was stolen from Him by a power that has no real right over it. It is the lost world.
But then, fourthly, God’s Son came into this world with the supreme object of recovering the inheritance to Himself—again, retrieving the lost and securing the lost inheritance to Himself as its rightful Owner.
And I think it is perhaps good for us to get back of everything and see what it is that lies there at the root of His coming: leaving everything, being divested of everything in heaven, and coming here; and coming to the day of which we are thinking today—the death of the Cross.
The thing right at the heart of all that is the recovery of His inheritance.
Now let me solemnly, reverently touch a point which goes deeper than anything else in this matter. When the Lord Jesus, on the Cross, cried:
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?
He went out into the lost place—the place of the lost; the place where the scapegoat was loosed to the wilderness, away from man and God. He took the place of a lost world and a lost humanity. He had lost everything.
The desolation of His soul! At that moment He had lost God, not heaven—yes, love. It is a terrible phrase, and I hesitate to use it: He was like a lost soul in that sense.
Isaiah says of Him that He poured out His soul unto death—unto death. What is this but that utter loss of everything?
He went out there to bring back, in His own Person, the lost inheritance—coming in touch, to the very depth, to the bottom, with our loss and God’s loss and His own loss. Oh, the wonder of the resurrection! It is essential to the whole matter.
But, you see, this world was lost. Yet even that, dear friends, is not all. That is all true, but there is an extra factor in it all—an extra factor, an element in that.
Out there, in that darkness and desolation, that wilderness of forsakenness, things were by no means passive. Out there, He went to meet the one who had robbed Him and God of everything, whom He Himself called the prince of this world.
Out there, as truly, and yet more truly and more fully, than in the combat for forty days after His baptism with the prince of this world, He met the usurper. He met the robber, the stealer. In awful conflict, in that darkness, He wrestled with the powers of darkness.
So terrible was it that the psalmist well described it:
They compassed Me about like bees;
they compassed Me about like bees.
These hosts of wicked spirits—out there He met that whole kingdom and hierarchy in full force.
He plunged in His imperial strength to depths of darkness down; He brought the trophy up, and bound the proud usurper’s claim. He wrested the inheritance from the false usurper. He fought this whole battle out in that dark moment on the Cross.
Oh, what a lot can be crowded into a few moments! An eternity can be. So it was within the Cross. The Cross was a far, far bigger crucifixion than the crucifixion of One Man. It is cosmic. It compasses the whole range of heaven and earth. That is all focused on that spot, in that moment.
He fought it through—this spiritual combat with the prince of this world and his kingdom. By His Cross, He, says Paul, stripped off principalities and powers, made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it.
That is number five. Number six: as the victorious Prince, He returns from the grave by the power of God. And coming back, He calls His co-heirs to the vocation of possessing the inheritance with Him—taking the inheritance which He has secured in Himself.
You know that Scripture:
Heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.
He calls them to this vocation and conflict of the inheritance. That is the meaning of the Christian life, of being a Christian: called into fellowship with His Son; called as co-heirs with Him to share the inheritance with Him; and called into the vocation of taking the inheritance and fighting its battle.
And it is unto all the nations, unto the uttermost part of the earth. The vocation of every Christian—listen, the vocation of every Christian; that includes you individually and corporately—is to have our feet down on some patch of this earth in the Name of the Lord Jesus.
And that other one, with all his powers, will try to shift you, move you, force you out, drive you out, make it impossible for you to stay. But that Name is sufficient. That Name is enough. He has won—not in our victory, but in Him.
The methods of those evil forces are too many to enumerate—innumerable inventions. But I put my finger upon one very favourite one, which, no doubt, is a very live issue with you and with me: the live issue of the accuser of the brethren.
If he cannot get us broken on the matter of Christ’s redemptive work for our ultimate salvation, he will seek to cripple and paralyse us on the ground of our unworthiness to be the Lord’s servants.
You know, it is the Lord’s servants who know most about the work of the accuser, because it is the vocation that he is after.
This is an issue which is alive right to the end. Dear friends, you may think that you have got past the Letter to the Romans, and you may have got into the Letter to the Ephesians. God help you. God help you.
You have the testimony of one who is not a novice or a beginner in this by any means: I need the Letter to the Romans more today than ever in all my past. My great justification—or, let me put it in another way—the righteousness of God which is in Christ Jesus.
You see, that is not only a salvation truth; that is a battle truth. That is a warrior truth.
The prophet says:
No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper;
and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn.
This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord,
and their righteousness is of Me, saith the Lord.
That is true; it is all true. But what does it mean when men hold their weapons against the people of God and they succeed? Men raise their tongues of accusation against the people of God and they succeed?
Apply it to the forces of evil back of everything, and it is true: “Their righteousness is of Me.” That cuts the ground from every accusation of the adversary, and that nullifies every weapon of the accuser.
The opposition of the enemy is along these lines: to make you feel the horror of your non-acceptance, your rejection by God, your being set aside by the Lord because God looks at you—what you are. It is a terrible battle.
“Their righteousness is of Me”—that is the Letter to the Romans. You need it in the battle. We need it in the battle. We need it. If we get through, we need it at the end.
We are in this battle. We are called into it for the inheritance. Inheritance is not salvation. We do nothing to earn salvation. Inheritance is far, far more than that. He calls us into this vocation of taking it—taking it by right.
I repeat: where you are—your home, your business, your place of spiritual service—any part of this world, as in fellowship with Jesus Christ, your fellowship with Him in this vocation holds that place for Him in His Name.
And do not move until the Lord says move. The Lord does move us sometimes, but we must have the Lord’s word for it. The enemy will make a great business of trying to dislodge us.
Now then, there are three things, of course, in these six points. The rightful and victorious Prince of this world calls us, as co-heirs, into the vocation and conflict of recovering the inheritance.
That means that, in the very core of fellowship with God’s Son, there is inherent conflict. You never realise that conflict until you take sides with Jesus Christ. The same is a quickshot: you find yourself almost immediately in some atmosphere that is charged with antagonism.
Without speaking or doing anything, you have got up against it. It is there. It is there. You are aware of it. If you go on with the Lord—and the more you go on with the Lord—the more this very atmosphere of antagonism grows upon you.
Not a very comforting gospel, this, for you, I know. But you know it is true. And the more you count for the inheritance, the more anything counts for the inheritance, the more violent the conflict.
I can mention here, and it will be for your prayers, that I had a long letter during this week from a dear aged sister whose name is known to many of you, whose writings perhaps are more widely known—the writer of God’s Plan of Redemption.
One who has meant much for the Lord and the inheritance for a long life is now lying in a nursing home after a very bad accident, from which it is doubtful she will recover. Very much alone.
And in her letter she said, “I am hard pressed of the evil powers in a way which I have never known in my life. Pray for me. Ask your friends to pray.”
Everyone who has meant much to the Lord in the matter of the inheritance—you would say, “Well, time for your head, the warfare is over. Lord, give her a calm evening.” But, dear friends, that is no isolated case. Everywhere, those who really represent something for the Lord are under that sort of pressure. It is intense.
Think of that dear servant in China, now in his seventh year of torture in prison. But, you see, you know the awful conflict. He does not know, unfortunately, of the tremendous value of his ministry, how he has kept us going here for months—his ministry embodied in that book, and other books.
We see it, but we know. We know. You see the correspondence about that; you hear the reports; you get tremendous things from many parts of the world. You would understand and realise that there is something in that—there is something which is from this conflict.
It is like this: if you do not count much for the Lord, you will not know much about that. There are many, many Christians who are serving Christianity and finding it a picnic—a good time. That is their idea of Christianity, and many are all right.
But you want to know what the intrinsic value, the ultimate value, is going to be—what the prince of this world so called thinks about it. You may take it that the call into fellowship with God’s Son in this great vocation has, however terrible, inherent in it the element of conflict.
The second thing is that our business, in the first instance, is to get our present token out of the nations—a token of them. You know, the Word of God tells us that in the first place the world will be won, perhaps, but we are told that is the first thing.
Notice how it is put: God first visited the nations to take out of them a people for His Name. A people for His Name—a token of them. That is our business: your business where you are, in your business, in the place where your feet are put down.
And there, if there is the enemy, there shall be taken a token of the inheritance in view of the great consummation. Yes, today, in common language, we speak about soul-winning and so on, but that is what it is.
See something bigger even than getting people saved and brought to Christ. That is important, but there is something behind it. There is a settled and fixed purpose, a purpose which began within the heart of God and reaches through the ages unto the ages of the ages.
One thing enters into that humanly—in the first practical instance, it gets a token. It is a token, but it is a token of the whole.
And thirdly, the ultimate consummation lies along that line: possession of the nations.
Ask of Me, and I will give Thee the nations for Thine inheritance,
and the uttermost parts of the earth for Thy possession.
That is to be fulfilled and granted to His Son. The kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdom of our God. That is the end of history.
The cost of all this is very great. The conflict is here. The demands upon us sometimes seem to be immense. And then the interests are so great that something is absolutely necessary if we are going to get through this.
We must have an adequate background for getting through. I have not exaggerated. Please, if you do not know what I am talking about, believe me: the involvements in this great business are very, very great, and there is a very expensive process.
Some basis, some background, which is adequate to meet it all and go through. And what is it? Oh, read again Jeremiah, if you have the patience to read right through this long book with him. Hear this man’s groans and cries and sighs and trouble.
Hear him say:
Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me,
a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth!
He is called the weeping prophet—I think wrongly so—but the man who was up against this terrible business. Terrible! At last they got him into a deep, dark dungeon, absolutely ready to leave him there to starve.
Then a kindly Ethiopian, hearing of his plight, appealed to the king, who commanded that they should take ropes and bring Jeremiah up from the pit. And there was the extra touch of kindness and understanding in the Ethiopian: he took a lot of old rags and put them around the ropes to go under Jeremiah’s arms, so that there should be no unnecessary pain.
So he goes through all that. Dear friends, we go through it all. And if you feel sometimes it is a hard way, an impossible way to get through, you need something—and you need what Jeremiah had. What did he have?
A glorious throne, set on high from the beginning,
is the place of our sanctuary.
Break it up: a glorious throne. There is the thought of government in glory; set on high, above all this, above all; set on high.
Not yesterday or today, but from eternity—from the beginning. It has been there from the beginning. Some eternal throne, set on high from the beginning, is the place of our sanctuary.
What picture does that bring up before your eyes? You see the fugitive. You see the one being pursued by the avenger of blood, running and rushing from his place in Israel to the city of refuge—the place of sanctuary.
A glorious throne, set on high from the beginning, is the place of our sanctuary—our refuge, our security, our safety, our preservation.
And when you come to think about it, not only Jeremiah, but Isaiah fulfilled his ministry on the strength of that:
In the year that king Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne,
high and lifted up.
And Ezekiel:
I was by the river Chebar,
and I saw visions of God;
the heavens were opened.
Above the firmament was the likeness of a throne. What is the word that colours the book of Daniel? Daniel, who knew something about this conflict and cost? The heavens do rule. The heavens do rule. That is the word again.
Thou shalt know that the heavens do rule.
And the same secret was that which carried Paul through all his sufferings. He had seen the Lord Jesus high and lifted up in glory.
God raised Him from the dead, set Him at His own right hand, far above all rule and authority and principality and power, and every name that is named. He highly exalted Him and gave Him the Name which is above every name.
Only so shall we get through. But so shall we get through: we see Him there, know that He is there, and keep our eyes on Him there—the glorious throne, set on high from the beginning.