Through the day, we have been occupied with a consideration, a recognition, of the great truth revealed in the Word of God: that God the Father has appointed His Son, our Lord Jesus, to be the horizon of all His interests and His activities.
Horizon, meaning the uttermost bound of His concern and the inclusive sphere of His activities. So this morning, somewhat comprehensively, we were laying a foundation for these hours.
The word horizon occurs in the New Testament, although not in our translation. It is translated—and we quite sympathise with the translators—the original word is translated “ordained”: “Whom He ordained.” That is repeated concerning the Lord Jesus. But the word is the word horizon: whom He made the horizon.
We are not going to spend any time on the definition. We are going to get on with what is contained in that. We are seeing that God has made His Son the ultimate range and bounds of His power in this creation.
But God has also made His Son the character, the norm, the representative, of how things are to be universally when God reaches His end: Christ all in all.
This afternoon, we commenced along the line of how, and on what ground, God moves toward that end. We saw God moving into this system of things, laying His hand upon a man, Abraham, to make him the first of a people who were to be for Him, in His desire, the repository of His full blessing for all men.
From the time that God laid His hand upon that key man, that generic man, he was, to begin with, brought into a history of deep discipline under that divine hand. On the one side, the discipline of undoing—continuous, and oft-times terrible undoing—bringing the man to the place where all he had was God.
On the other side, God was constituting him positively on those principles which are to obtain and govern in the universal state of things toward which God is moving.
We saw Israel under the hand of God in discipline, to be made God’s servant people. The principle of servanthood governed everything—all God’s ways with them. Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, Moses, David, and all the other representative ones were dealt with on this principle of servanthood: utter, complete yieldedness and brokenness before God.
That was the way. Now, do we not with no superficial glance see these men on their faces before God? When we want the key to their lives, that is the key, with all their faults, their errors, their mistakes, their sins, and sometimes their grossness, if you will.
One thing of God in their histories, in their lives, which kept them under His hand, was that they were men down at His feet: broken men, empty men, humble men, men on their faces.
And true, that was of David. They have many things to say against David, but the thing that God takes note of is that he was a man on his face before God: worship, adoration, surrender. In every controversy that the Lord had with him, he comes down—comes down on his knees. So he became a part of that vessel God was seeking to form for His service.
This afternoon again, we brought this over into the case of the One in whom all the history of Israel in discipline was summed up; who took it up in Himself in fullness; in whom this principle of utter abandonment to the will of God comes to perfection: the Lord Jesus.
We looked at His beginnings on this earth: the vessel by which He came into this world, the virgin Mary. We saw the greatness of the cost to Mary to accept that vocation.
After weighing it all up, after facing all that was involved—social stigma, personal dilemma, religious crisis—she came out:
Behold, the handmaid of the Lord;
be it unto me according to thy word.
And out of that spirit, that attitude, Christ came into this world. We may say that the spirit of servanthood was found in Him by the very nature and method of His birth.
We further saw the circumstances of His birth: all those conditions around Him at that time, in that event, which were anything but the conditions of a lord, of a king, of a great one, one of importance, name, and standing. All to the contrary: His coming as a servant on the lowest plane of human life.
And from that moment onward, His life was one long discipline by reason of that law of servanthood. We went on then to the thirty silent years, giving that explanation which has so often been sought as to why thirty years should be spent in hiddenness and silence, and apparent nothingness: learning subjection, submission, patience, trust in God when God is doing nothing, and all that.
You see, the law of divine service is the way for the end when all God’s universe shall be filled with that spirit: His servants, selfless servants, the last ones.
Now this evening, we take the next step: the baptism of the Lord Jesus, another great example of this same thing.
Before we can come to His baptism, we must look at His forerunner, John the Baptist, and appraise, as far as we can, the situation at that time. There is little doubt but that it was a situation of concern.
Multitudes went out to John—multitudes went out to John. So many that, when Jesus challenged the leaders of the nation with His question, “The baptism of John, was it of heaven, or was it of men?” they said:
If we shall say, From heaven; He will say unto us, Why then did ye not believe him?
But if we shall say, From men; we fear the multitude; for all hold John as a prophet.
They went out by their multitudes to John. Why? Well, it may be that there was a movement of the Spirit of God at that time—what we in our times might call revival. But quite evidently, by their going out in their hordes, there was a concern about something.
Perhaps a weariness of things as they were, a sense of frustration—that upon which the Lord Jesus put His finger when He said:
Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Weariness and frustration, in quest of some answer. Further, evidently, there was a real sense of sin—a real sense of sin—for they went to John to be baptised of him in Jordan, confessing their sins.
Sin is sin. And we know from his message that that was the heart of the thing. His message was concerning the remission of sins.
That was the situation, the state of things, in brief. But look at John. John, with all the apparent success of his mission and ministry—you may think that multitudes going out signified tremendous success of that movement—with all the apparent success, John was labouring under a sense of limitation.
He betrays it. He betrays it:
I indeed baptize you in water:
but there cometh He that is mightier than I,
and He shall baptize you in the Holy Spirit and in fire.
Mine is, after all, a limited kind of thing. What you need, what I need, is that greater, greater thing. He preaches remission of sins, and they confess their sins. He baptises them unto the remission of their sins.
Then he lifts up his eyes and beholds Jesus, and says:
Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!
“I cannot do that. I may have crowds here, but mine is not a cosmic salvation. Mine is not a whole-world salvation. After all, it is limited. It is this One, this Lamb of God, who will expand this whole ministry of salvation, forgiveness, remission, and expand it to the whole world.”
That is the horizon. That is the horizon. Do not get outside of that; tie into that.
But note again John. What was the principle of John’s life? Was it not servanthood? Remember that John the Baptist was the sum and climax of all Hebrew prophecy, the last of the prophets of Israel.
“There hath not risen,” said Jesus, “a greater than John the Baptist.” That is saying a tremendous amount. You look over the Old Testament: in him is summed up all the meaning of the prophets of the Old Testament. Here is the climax of that, and what harbours the meaning? Servanthood—servanthood every time, all along the way.
Look at John. John, I think, is the most beautiful and impressive picture of a servant. They sent their representatives to ask him who he was. Here they come: “Who art thou?” What an opportunity! What an opportunity! What a lot of men would snatch at that opportunity.
“Why, do you not know? I am Elijah who was to come. Do you not know that I am fulfilling that prophecy of Malachi: ‘He shall send His messenger before His face’? Do you not know who I am?”
No. “I am a voice, crying in the wilderness.” Oh, boy! That is him.
He must increase, but I must decrease.
“I do this, but He will do so much more.” As forerunner, harbinger of the Christ, he is so governed by the spirit of service that he brings Christ in on them; he brings Christ before men. “I decrease. He is greater than I.”
Do you hear any lawyers talking like that? Any pure-hearted, selfless servant talking like that, even in this world? “Why, after all, I am only an employee. I am only a servant. My master is the man. He is the man. He is the one. You want to know anything, you go to him. You want to see how things ought to be done, you go to him.”
That is the true spirit. They have not got a great deal of it in the world these days, but that is it, is it not? And that is John the Baptist: the great servant of the Lord, whose service is constituted on this principle of self-abnegation, self-abasement, self-humbling.
“I am not. I am only. I am only a voice.” Well, to be less than that, of course, is to be silent. But just to be a voice is the positive side of service.
There is the door—the door for Jesus. John was the door. John opened the door and let Jesus in. And that is the kind of thing that the door is.
Now we pass to Jesus Himself and His baptism. We have quoted: they went out to John and were baptised of him, confessing their sins.
John must have had to listen to a great many tragic and deplorable stories, confessing their sins. What a build-up there must have been on Jordan’s bank: a confession of sin.
It does not do to allow our imagination to carry us away, but it says that they were confessing their sins. Imagination may make us say, “Here is this man coming and confessing he has robbed, he has done this and that.” The whole crowd coming, confessing their sins—and that is the situation.
And Jesus steps right into that and asks to be baptised with the rest: confessing their sins, and Jesus coming with them, joining in with the sinners and their sin, and saying, “Suffer it to be so now.”
John had sufficient perception and discernment to see that this was not one of the rest. This was a different One. He was not like these others. And he would have prevented Him, saying:
I have need to be baptized of Thee, and comest Thou to me?
But Jesus insisted:
Suffer it to be so now:
for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.
Then he suffered Him. Jesus—the sinless, spotless Lamb of God, without blame, without blemish—stepping into the place of the sinners, amongst the sinners.
But John sees in Him more than that crowd. He sees the One taking away the sin of the world. More than all these terrible stories to which he had had to listen, all these confessions which had poured into his ears: the whole world, the whole world—this thing multiplied ten thousand times ten thousand. Jesus steps into that.
The horizon is set, for sin is universal. Is sin only the sin of those who confess it, or is it worldwide? We know what the answer to that is. And that is the horizon of sin.
Jesus, the Lamb, the sin-bearing, sacrificial Lamb, compasses the whole range of sin. That is His service to God. That is His service to God.
But look at the cost. Look at the humbling, the emptying. For Him, He knew Who He was. He could later say, “Which of you convicteth Me of sin?” Challenging—and yet, as coming right down here for the sin of the world, emptying Himself, being made sin, He Who knew no sin.
That is the spirit of service. In Israel, we have seen the many types and figures, the sacrifices, bulls and lambs. And here is the One Who did what all the millions of those sacrifices could never accomplish: take away the sins of the world. The One.
But this is the thing I am burdened to impress upon you. This is so patently, according to the Word of God, the way—the way toward that great universal issue when all things should take their character from Christ. It is the costly way, the way of emptying, of suffering.
We are accepting charges. Very often, we may be called upon to accept charges which are false. The New Testament tells us so.
When there are those things which would put us in a false light, they are not true about us, and we are not allowed to open our lips. We are not allowed to give an answer. This Lamb of God was silent in the presence of the false witnesses—all the false charges. He knew so well.
That is the spirit which leads on to, “Wherefore God highly exalted Him.” That leads unto, “All authority hath been given unto Me in heaven and on earth.” Now there is your horizon of Christ in redemption.
We are not surprised, are we? But when He took that position, He accepted that in the spirit of the true servant Lamb. Immediately the heavens were opened.
The heavens were the horizon—well, so to speak, pressed back to the utmost bounds. The heavens were opened. The divine voice was heard, attesting:
This is My beloved Son,
in Whom I am well pleased.
That is what happened in His case. The heavens were open over Him: a clear way right through, right through to the Father. “My Son, My Son.”
All earth’s bounds were broken; all the limitations of a sinful world horizon were broken through. Heaven was open.
But what is in His case is what God is working toward for this whole creation: an opened heaven. That is where you finish your Bible, is it not?
And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high,
and showed me the holy city Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.
The picture which follows is the picture of people under an open heaven. That was secured when Jesus took His place with the world’s sinners and sin in His baptism.
And I say, what is true in His case is what will be true when Christ, in those terms, is reproduced in His people.
It is true. This may sound like teaching, but it can always be put to the test. When the Lord Jesus comes into any life, into His place in any life—call it how you will, conversion, new birth—when He comes in, is it not true that the consciousness is that the dome has been removed from over our heads, between us and God? Heaven is open.
The Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. When Christ comes into His place on this ground—that He is the norm and the representation of what God is going to have—and as such comes into our lives, there is an open heaven.
On this ground, that He is the norm and the representation of what God is going to have, and as such comes into our lives, there is an open heaven; and the inward attestation of the Spirit begins, His assuring us that we are children of God.
I am not going to try to carry you further this evening. All this, I do not know how far, how much, it is registering with you.
I can tell you that, as far as I am concerned, it is not studied teaching. It comes out of a quest to know what it is the Lord is trying to do in our lives. What is it? Is He doing anything?
He must be, because things are so strong, so real, sometimes so terrible, in spiritual experience. Something we cannot get away from. It is not just all calm, quiet, negative nothing. It is upheaval. It is basic. It is challenge, it is testing, suffering, it is adversity. What is God doing? That is my question. I am sure it must be yours.
I have sought the answer, and this I believe to be it: as through the Old Testament, as in the case of His own Son, as in the case of the apostles, as in the case of the church and the churches, not long after the Lord comes into His place, you find this rupture and rift and conflict set up in furious antagonism in spiritual consciousness.
It is all under the hand of God. He is permitting it, allowing it. If God is over all, if He is responsible for all, if He is Lord of all, we have got to settle that—settle that. He is either Lord or He is not Lord; there are no halfways over this.
If He is, then, as truly as God said to the devil over Job, “You can go so far. I give you liberty up to a point. I allow you so far,” as truly as that, in our case the Lord permits, gives tenure, to the forces of evil.
What is He doing? He has introduced this historic discipline on the one side: bringing us into weakness, into weakness—the thing we do not like, the thing we like least of all things: to feel weak.
One of the most amazing things: a man like Saul of Tarsus should say that he glories in weaknesses—glories in weakness, feels weak.
“Yes, He weakened my strength in the way.” No, you have not got it in yourself. If the Lord does not provide it, you finish. That kind of thing, on the one side, is going on in Christian lives.
On the other side, is it not true that where that has its way, the Lord is given His way? Something about the character—the beauty—the other kind of strength that is Christ begins to show itself: an influence, an influence.
Oh, for a mighty influence to go out from our lives; for us to be an influence for God, for heaven, building up for something positive of Christ. On the other side, this is the interpretation.
With yet much ground to cover, to see it in other connections in the life of our Lord, that again is enough to put our feet on the way of God’s work and God’s purpose, God’s method, God’s end.
There is no doubt about it. When God reaches the end that He has set, it will be this kind of Christ that is made everywhere. You are not going to strut about heaven, little lords, important people.
When we really reach the end, we will be saying, “It is all of His grace. It is all of His grace. It is all due to the Lord. It is the Lord—just Him.”
And that is how it will be for eternity. It is the Lord. He will be our occupation and our theme of praise.