As we embark upon this full day of ministry, of speaking and of hearing the Word of God, may I preface it by pointing out that all ministry of the Word of God ought to contain, in the main, three themes.
The first is the greatness and the nature of our calling, our calling in Christ. May we understand those two words: the greatness of our calling in Christ, and the nature of our calling.
The second is the meaning of the experience, the conflict, and the discipline that goes with that calling. In our calling in Christ, we find ourselves very soon in a great conflict, and we find that we are being brought under very severe and continuous discipline.
It is very necessary, therefore, for us to know the meaning of that conflict—what it is all about—and the meaning of that discipline: what it is unto.
And thirdly, the provisions and resources available to the Lord’s people for a triumphant issue of the calling. That, I feel, comprehends ministry.
Those three things, although we are not going to dwell upon them, will lie behind all that we have to say today.
We are now and then coming back to the second chapter of the Book of Acts. You have that before you.
I am not going to embark upon an exposition of the chapter in its verses, its clauses, its particular and specific subjects. It is the chapter as a chapter—not in the Bible, nor in the New Testament—but as a chapter in history.
There is a very great importance attached to our understanding of this one chapter. I think, as we go on, it will become more and more clear to you what an important chapter this is.
I trust that you will see its importance more fully and clearly than ever you have done before. But I repeat: it is fundamental to all Christian life.
It is fundamental to the three things which I have mentioned as constituting ministry to the Lord’s people, that we understand the second chapter of the Book of Acts. Perhaps you think you do. You have read it, had it read, had it preached on numerous times.
When I say what I am saying now about it, I am fully aware that more than fifty years of ministry lie behind what I am saying. I would not dare to come to you with this whole thing exhausted and begin to give you something on an exhausted subject.
But what I mean is that I am more and more aware myself, as time goes on, of the inexhaustible fullness of this one chapter. Well, let us approach it.
There are, as we Christians well know, three major truths which lie beneath Christianity. Those three are the incarnation of the Son of God, the second Person of the Trinity, coming into this world in man-form.
The second is the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, meaning His death and His resurrection—two sides of one thing: the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ.
And the third is now conveyed to our minds by the word Pentecost; that is, the advent of the Holy Spirit. These are the three major truths of Christianity.
There is a sense in which each of these might be said to be the greatest. We might say that God coming into this world in a body, in Christ in human form, is the greatest thing that has ever happened in the world. It would be easy to make that supreme.
But then we might, as we contemplate it, say the same about the death and resurrection of the Lord: the greatest thing that has happened in the history of mankind.
And then again, how easy it would be to say that the day of Pentecost was the greatest thing in human history.
But we cannot say that of each, or any, of these separately. We can only say it in a related way. They all three comprise one marvellous combination of divine activity.
They are not separate from one another. The first links to the second, and the second to the third; they are interdependent and interrelated. Not one of them exclusively comprehends the whole movement of God so far as this world is concerned.
Without the incarnation, there would be no Redeemer. Without the cross, there would be no redemption. Without the advent of the Spirit, there would be no church with its world mission.
All these combine to make Christianity full.
When we come to the matter that is before us, gathered into that term Pentecost, we know that Jesus placed very great importance upon the advent of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, He placed a greater importance upon it than upon His remaining in this world in the flesh.
It is expedient for you that I go away.
“Expedient for you that I go away.” That cut consternation into those who heard it. It was a thing to which they reacted with a sense of hopeless and helpless despair, if it should take place.
Everything for them—their training, their religious education, all their commitments—was bound up with the Messiah here in this world. And He said, over against all that, “It is expedient that I go away. Better for you. Indeed, it is the best thing for you.”
If I go not away, the Comforter, the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, will not come.
So He invested a very great importance in the advent, the coming, of the Holy Spirit—of much more importance than His own physical presence in this world.
That advent would mean for Him His own release into universal energy of ministry, of power, and of presence. He knew that. “I am straitened,” He said, “until this baptism is accomplished. I am straitened.”
But here, at this time, the Lord leads us to contemplate, at least if we do not comprehend, the vast significance of that which took place on that particular day in Jerusalem, on the day of Pentecost—the vast significance of that in the divine design.
Perhaps our best way of making contact with that is to look at some titles, some designations, given to the Holy Spirit. Not all; perhaps one or two today. One of them will be enough for the day, I am sure.
Just as we are instructed as to the Person and work of the Lord Jesus by the names and titles which are given to Him—and ever remember, dear friends, names and titles of the Lord Jesus are indicative of His Person and His work—so it is with the Holy Spirit.
We come to know and understand the Holy Spirit in His Person and in His purpose by looking into the titles which are given to Him in the Word of God.
We leave for the present this general and common title, “the Holy Spirit.” About that we may have something to say later, if we are able.
But leaving that familiar title, the one which introduces us to the comprehensiveness of His Person and His function is the one mentioned in Hebrews 9:14: “the eternal Spirit.”
Through the eternal Spirit.
The eternal Spirit. Now that means two things, one of which we are not going to say enough about. It means that He is one with God eternal. That speaks of His Godhead, His deity, as a member of the divine Trinity.
Eternal—timeless, truly so, as ever we mean when we speak of eternal God. That is the obvious first meaning; we leave that.
But this title also relates to His office and His function: His office and His function as the eternal Spirit. There is our door through which we walk into this vast, this great revelation of God to man.
In this second connection of the eternal Spirit, we find in the Bible four major features of His function. I will mention them. I have very little hope of being able to speak about all—about ninety percent of what I have in my heart to say. We have just got to go as far as we are able.
I mention them, and you can have much fuller meditation than I am able to give by exposition.
Firstly, the Bible reveals concerning the Holy Spirit, as the eternal Spirit, His commitment to effecting the eternal purpose of God.
The Holy Spirit is, in His divine function, committed—committed to the effecting of God’s eternal purpose. There is a statement. Your Bible lies open with that statement.
Creation: He is there as the active Agent in the beginning. From that moment onward, the Spirit of God is moving, moving all the time, moving in an executive, active way, as the custodian of the divine purpose, in charge of something to which He has committed Himself.
The exactness of that I will come back to in a few moments.
That purpose of God is fixed and unchangeable. Let that be recognized. There is a purpose in the Godhead concerning this world and its place in His universe, and that purpose is fixed and unchangeable.
The Holy Spirit is the One committed to see to it that it is not changed, but that it persists and cannot be defeated. He has taken responsibility for that. It is a fixed purpose, unchanging and unchangeable.
But that purpose is pursued by the Holy Spirit by diverse means, in various ways, through history. So the Bible is our record of the diversity and variety of divine methods and means in relation to the one ultimate purpose and goal.
The Spirit will at one time move in this way, take up this means; at another time, another way, by another means. How many, how diverse and varied, are the ways of God as recorded in the Scriptures—the means employed, the goings of the Spirit.
Yes, that is true. And that aspect of things sees what is changeable and what is transient, whereas the purpose is unchanging and eternal. The methods of reaching it vary and change from time to time.
Something is taken up just for the time being in that relation, and then it is done and set aside. That is what is in the Bible about the Holy Spirit. You see the galaxy of instruments, means, and the tremendous range of different forms of the Holy Spirit’s activity.
Yes, many ways, but one end—an unchanging end.
The next thing about the eternal Spirit is that He is committed to the maintaining of the absolute sovereignty of God.
The absolute sovereignty of God: God, and very God, and only God—supreme and eternal, alone God. The Holy Spirit is committed to the maintaining of that reality: the absolute and undivided sovereignty of God. The Bible is all about that.
Divide anything between God and another or others, and you encounter the Holy Spirit. You now have it. This is inexorable. This is unchallengeable.
Interfere with this, and you see what the Bible says throughout that dark side of the Bible: all the tragedies, all the chaos, confusion, frustration, loss of time, loss in every way.
The Holy Spirit is committed to one thing here: God is God, and He alone has all the rights in this universe. Question that, dispute that, withhold those rights from Him in any detail or respect, and the Holy Spirit is up against you—and you are up against the Holy Spirit.
He is committed to the maintaining of the sovereignty of God in absoluteness.
And the fourth thing about the Holy Spirit’s commitment is His jealousy and His consistency with the eternal principle of God and His purpose.
You may be very tired of that word “principle,” or “principles.” You may revolt against it somehow, instead of always talking about principle. Well, all right, if you like to take that attitude, you can.
For some of us, that is the word that has opened the door to a vast realm of divine meaning and explanation.
Let it be recognized, if you have to recognize it. Go back to your Bible; investigate with this thought in your mind and before your eyes, and see that God has His own way of doing things.
You cannot get to God’s end by any way but God’s way. You cannot achieve God’s purpose by any means but God’s means.
You have got to come into God’s thoughts, God’s judgments, God’s standards, God’s estimates, God’s values—how God looks at things, sees things, raises things up. You have got to come into that in order to be one with Him in His eternal purpose.
It is God’s work in God’s way. And what a lot of tragic history hangs upon failure to recognize that, as though by any means, any way, anyhow, we can do God’s work. Well, it does not work out that way. It does not work out there.
Those who get nearest to the Lord and walk closest to Him know very well that they have got to ask the Lord about everything. Even the things that seem to be the most rational and sensible things, they have to ask the Lord, “Is this right? Is my natural common sense safe in this matter?”
How often we have discovered that which seemed to us to be convincingly the right thing did not find the Holy Spirit’s assent.
But what I am saying then, dear friends, is that the Holy Spirit is very jealous for the divine principle. It is one of the most fascinating—if one can use that word about the Bible—things to see the consistency of the Holy Spirit with principle.
Get hold of a single principle and see how the Holy Spirit is consistent with that. I dare not put in parentheses instances of it in the Bible, but there it is. The Holy Spirit is just not having that because it is not consistent with the design, but He is having the other because there is no inconsistency, no contradiction there.
It is wholly in line with the divine thought, the divine feeling about things.
If you want the Holy Spirit to be with you, standing with you, you have got to get right into line with this. Sometimes it requires a lot of sifting out, sifting out, sifting out.
Where is it? Where have we defaulted? Where is our mistake? Where have we blundered? What is it that the Lord is not agreeing with and not letting us get away with? What is it?
Then, after much heart-searching and breaking and emptying, we light upon it. “That is it. That is it.” And when we have got that, the whole thing is released.
The Holy Spirit is very jealous about divine principle, and wholly consistent therewith. Is that introductory to this: the Holy Spirit’s commitment to the eternal purpose of God?
But when we have said that, and much more that could be said, we are still here before this: committed to the eternal purpose. What is it?
What is the eternal purpose to which the Holy Spirit is thus committed, to which He will hold, from which He will not deviate, and about which He will be so jealous as to its details? What is it?
May I turn you to some Scriptures which are like windows through which we can look? They are but fragments.
The first is in that Gospel which is fairly generally believed to be the first Gospel record that was written. I mention that because, if that is true, there is a greater significance about this little fragment: the Gospel by Mark, Mark 1:14-15.
Now after John was delivered up, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God,
and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe in the gospel.
Hold that for a few minutes while we turn to Galatians 4:4-5.
But when the fulness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law,
that He might redeem them that were under the law,
that we might receive the adoption of sons.
When the fullness of the time came—or was come. Back now to Matthew’s Gospel, Matthew 16:28.
Verily I say unto you, there are some of them that stand here, who shall in no wise taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in His kingdom.
And finally, for the moment, Acts 1:3.
To whom He also showed Himself alive after His passion by many proofs, appearing unto them by the space of forty days, and speaking the things concerning the kingdom of God.
Now we have two things here in those four passages: two passages on one hand and two passages on the other. But they are only, of course, introductory passages to a vast amount more.
Firstly: “The time is fulfilled”; “in the fullness of the time.”
Fullness is the word for completeness. Completeness. A whole era of time is now completed, and all its meaning and content have headed up to this moment. This is the fullness of all that, and this is the climax of all that.
The first thing that Jesus announced in His preaching was, “Time is fulfilled. Time is completed. All that is now coming to its issue.”
Stretching right back over all time since time began, there has been something moving under the Holy Spirit, in those diverse manners, that variety of means. All that we have in the long story recorded in the Old Testament from the beginning—all that, under the Holy Spirit, has been moving up to this hour.
This hour is the completeness of that, the fullness of that—all that time.
In the fulness of the time, God sent forth His Son.
The climax of past dispensations. I am interested, just as by the way, in noting that Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, Ephesians 1:10, looks on and uses the plural form of the statement. He speaks of that which will be the fullness of the times. Here it is singular: the fullness of time.
He looks on and says that in the fullness of the times God will gather together all things in Christ. There will be another great climax when all the divisions of time will be gathered into this one thing. But that by the way; stay with that, or even hold it for the moment.
Here is this wonderful thing: there has been something in view from the beginning of time. God has had something in His mind right from the beginning of time, which was introduced into this world when time was introduced.
When God made day and night, summer and winter, springtime and harvest; made weeks and months and years and decades and centuries and all the rest of the divisions of time, God had a thought that was to run through all that section of time and govern it.
We have said the Holy Spirit has been pursuing that from the beginning. And now comes this startling word: that has reached its climax; that has come to its issue. All the meaning of time up to this moment is now divulged. It is out.
It comes out with the incarnation of the Son of God: “In the fullness of the time God sent forth His Son.” What is it?
Well, the other passages give the answer. “The time is fulfilled; the kingdom of God is at hand.” You have come right into all that has been in God’s mind from the beginning.
What is this eternal thought? A kingdom—a divine kingdom, God’s kingdom, a heavenly kingdom. The kingdom is at hand.
The last thing about which the Lord Jesus spoke was the same as the first thing that He uttered in His preaching. In Acts, He was speaking to them of the kingdom. It comprehended His life.
He steps out onto the platform of His world ministry and says, “The kingdom is here, at hand”—meaning, more literally, on hand, right at hand, imminent, present.
After His resurrection, up to His return to heaven, the last thing He was speaking about was the kingdom. It is impressive. It is impressive that that was the last thing the Apostle Paul spoke about of which we have any record.
In the last chapter of the Book of Acts, in his own hired house, receiving all that came unto him, he preached concerning the kingdom. This is haunting. This is something.
Yes, the purpose, comprehensively, is the kingdom of God: the reign of God and that order of heaven.
Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.
That is the kingdom. That is the kingdom.
So the eternal purpose is this divine, heavenly kingdom and rule over this world, at least.
From that general and inclusive truth and revelation, we are led to these three things that come out on the day of Pentecost. For on that day, Matthew 16:28 had at least a partial and immediate fulfilment.
There are some of them that stand here, who shall in no wise taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in His kingdom.
That happened on the day of Pentecost. When He was about to leave them, He said, “Not many days hence.” Not many days hence it happened.
But when it happened—the advent of the kingdom, the long-delayed, long-awaited, long-prophesied kingdom, the long-illustrated kingdom—when it happened, what were the three things that related to its coming?
Well, look at Acts 2. If Acts 2 is the advent of the kingdom in the consummation of time, after that point the first thing brought right into view so powerfully and so pre-eminently is the King Himself.
God raised Him up. He ascended Him on high. Of course, we need to crowd into that all the other wonderful teaching in the New Testament: God raised Him and set Him at His own right hand, far above all rule and authority and every name that is named; He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens, and so on.
But that is here on the day of Pentecost. It is both explicit and implicit:
Let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly, that God hath made Him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom ye crucified.
The King is in His place. He is there. You must have the King in order to have a kingdom.
So, with the coming in of the kingdom, the great reality of Christ’s lordship becomes the dominant note of apostolic preaching. We have heard it: He is Lord of all.
We can say that, from one standpoint, the whole of this Book of Acts, so called, is the account of His lordship in many ways. But there it is: inexorable, unchangeable, unchallengeable, because in the hands of the Holy Spirit this kingdom of this King is something eternal, not just of an hour.
The King is installed. The kingdom has come with power—with power.
With all the heart-sinking that comes with our contemplation of things today, where we are concerned, where the church is concerned, where the spiritual state is concerned, it still remains that this kingdom is a kingdom of superior power—the kingdom of power.
It seems to me that the Holy Spirit went out of His way, causing this record to be written, to indicate this feature of the kingdom: its power.
Well, if you have ever been caught in anything like a hurricane, you know something of the meaning of power. Get into a gale on the sea and see what you can do with it.
Some of us have travelled on the mightiest ships that exist in this world—great vessels with their immense engine power—and we have been hove to for many hours because the gale was too great. We could not cope with it. The only thing to do was stand still and let it blow itself out. It was useless to plan to cope with that.
And suddenly there came from heaven a sound as of the rushing of a mighty wind.
A mighty rushing wind is the symbol of the advent of the Holy Spirit, conveying the idea that this kingdom is a kingdom of power.
Oh yes, you are saying with me, “Oh, for the recovery and experience of that. Oh, to know something more of that.” But our failure, the church’s failure, has its reasons. It is not my subject. It is not the Lord’s fault. It is not a change in the Holy Spirit; it is the church’s fault entirely that this power is not in manifestation as it should be.
But of course it is still working, very largely working hiddenly, very largely. The story will be read at last, when we can see even what the Holy Spirit has done in days like these, when everything seems to be in suspense or defeat.
The Spirit of God has not evacuated the scene and has not let go His commitment—not at all. But the advent of the kingdom is in power.
Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Spirit is come upon you.
I, dear friends, do not want to be just giving out a lot of words and ideas, even though this may be the truth. For me there is a challenge in it all the time, and I want that challenge to come to your heart.
Our powerlessness, our weakness, our ineffectiveness, our impotence and confusion cannot be attributed to the Holy Spirit. We ought to seriously and solemnly investigate the matter. Why is there not more power?
Oh, for more power in our preaching—the Holy Spirit registering with impact because the Word is given. That is what I come to.
But oh, for more power in our hearing and our receiving, that there may be in us something like the hammer-blows of the Word of God.
Yes, we are sadly in need of the power of the kingdom. So the kingdom is still amongst us.
And the third thing that characterized the coming of the kingdom, such a significant thing, was the birth of the church—the birth of the church.
On that day, the church was born.
And what is the relationship of the church to the kingdom?
It is here, of course, that the reason is given for so much careful, serious instruction about the church. You may have lost some of the great impress of that word by reason of familiarity. If it has become but a system of truth to you, an idea in a more or less objective way, listen now, and ask the Lord to recover that loss.
For, you see, this that is called “My church”—“My church”—has a very, very close place to the heart of the King, of the Lord, in relation to His kingdom.
What is it? Well, if we use a figure from the Word of God, it is the innermost thing in the whole range of the divine rule which is to be ultimately the divine rule.
The kingdom is a very far-reaching and comprehensive hope and intention of God, to embrace all things. But right at the heart of that great spiritual territory, there is a city. There is a city.
The city is a divine idea, or it is taken up by God and used as a divine idea. It is.