Now, Lord, we have been reminded of that great occasion when Thy Word was given, and those that had understanding gave the sense, and the people knew what it was that the Lord was saying.
We do pray that it may be like that here. We are a little company; the Word of the Lord is amongst us. But there is a need that we should come into understanding, and therefore there is the need of an interpreter.
Thou hast given the Holy Spirit to interpret the things of God, and our prayer is that He will do that work here tonight, fulfilling the Word and promise of the Lord Jesus:
He shall guide you into all the truth.
O Spirit of the Lord, and Spirit of the Word, guide us into the truth tonight. May we not only hear Thy Word, but be led into the Word, to have our life in the Word.
Lord, be very gracious to us, as Thou knowest and understandest our need. For Thy name’s sake, we ask it. Amen.
I hope that no one here this evening will take any offence when I say that my sense of leading at this time is to take you back to the foundation of our life in Christ.
I expect most of you have had the experience of having many times gone over the same road, travelled in the same area, until it has become so familiar to you that you hardly notice it at all. Then, one day, you take with you over that old road someone who has never been there.
The whole thing takes on new life and new interest. You are impressed with the things that they see which you never saw. It wakes up. It is almost as though you had never been that way; you are seeing it through other and new eyes.
Often it is like that. Now, I think that is a very helpful way of coming to the Word of God: trying to approach it as though we knew nothing about it, as though we had never seen it before.
Forget all that we do know, for the time being, and take it up and pursue it with that mind—that is, looking at it in an altogether new way, with new eyes, as though it were for the first time.
Now, if we were strangers—complete strangers—to Christianity and the Bible, and were anxious to know what it really is, so that we sat down with the New Testament and read it carefully, diligently, seekingly, honestly, what would it be that would impress us most? What would it be that would confront us supremely?
I wonder if you have ever approached the Word in that way. Now, what is it, really, that is the message of this Book? What is it that comes out most distinctly and definitely as we read it?
Now, if you were such a person as I have imagined, coming for the first time in a spirit of inquiry to the New Testament and reading, do you not think that the thing which would confront you more than anything else would be this: this Book is all about one Jesus.
And the thing about Him is that He was crucified and then rose from the dead.
That seems to be the uppermost and commonest thing in this whole Book. There are four narratives of His life. In a good number of respects they differ, but they all finish here, on this.
There is one thing toward which every writer seems to have been moving, and which he puts over everything else: the death of this One and His resurrection.
Then there follows a book of the history of early Christianity, and when we look at it, it is all about the same thing: this Jesus, who was crucified, but who was raised from the dead.
Then we go on into the letters, or epistles, written by the first apostles of this One, Jesus, and we find that they are all based upon this one thing: Jesus, who died, is alive.
One phrase occurs repeatedly—indeed, in different forms, twenty-five times:
This Jesus did God raise up from the dead.
Well, noting that and being impressed with that, we should draw our conclusion. As strangers to this whole story, our conclusion would be that Christianity is built upon one thing, and that one supreme thing is the resurrection of Jesus.
That, of course, could only be if He had died. So the supreme thing about it is the resurrection of Jesus. This is what the New Testament is full of, what dominates it all, and what stands out above everything else.
But we should not be able to stop there. Having got that far, we should be impressed with another, a further feature. It is that although comparatively few of the people mentioned and concerned in this Book claim to have seen Jesus after His resurrection, they are all enjoying the reality of it.
By far the greater majority are living on the basis of that truth. It is something tremendously real to them, not because they had been told about it or because it had been preached to them—though they had been taught.
Because, you know, you do not really, livingly, come into things by teaching. You know that. You can be taught and taught and taught, thoroughly and soundly, and for a long time, and yet not be in the real enjoyment and experience of it all.
Teaching may be vital; it may be important. But these people whom we meet in this New Testament are not what they are, living as they are, because they have heard about Jesus being raised from the dead.
They are living as they are because Jesus, raised from the dead, is in His resurrection life there and then, present with them. It is not something that happened a few years ago—oh, many years ago. It is not something in history, or in Christian doctrine and teaching. It is something right here and now.
Jesus might, at this very moment, in this very hour, have risen from the dead and appeared to them. It is like that with them. It is a present reality in experience. That is what the stranger would be impressed with.
This Book is alive. It is alive, and everything in it is alive because Jesus is alive in the present experience of all those who have believed.
Then, if you were still inquiring, you would ask the question: “Now, those things are quite evident in this Book. There is no mistake there. But how did it come about? What is the explanation of a historic fact becoming an immediate, up-to-date experience with such an effect on people’s lives?”
Because, you know, this matter of resurrection from the dead is a really startling thing. Oh, we have got so familiar with the truth of the resurrection of Jesus that it can be something we know so well without any great wonder in it.
I venture to say, if anyone in your family really died and was buried, and you had seen them dead and buried, and a week or more afterward they came into your room—and there was no mistaking it, this was your own one, really, no mere apparition—you would, well, I do not know what would happen to you.
You would be, perhaps, startled. You would certainly say, “Well, this is the most wonderful thing I have ever known. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Indeed, I never believed, never thought, that such a thing could happen.”
You would be living in the wonder of it, the surprise of it, the amazement of it. It would become a tremendous power in your life and have an effect upon you. What you would be saying is this: “Well, if that can happen, anything can happen.” That is just how it was, you see—just how it was.
They not only knew in their minds, by information, that Jesus was raised from the dead. The wonder of the resurrection was there and then as real to them as Christ risen—as though they had been with that handful who had seen Him with their own eyes of flesh after His resurrection—just as real as that.
But I was saying, as an inquirer, you would say, “How do you explain this? What is the explanation? How is it that it comes about like this?” Then you would have to go back to your New Testament and begin to read again to find out how.
As you made inquiry as to the how, you would light upon a corresponding factor in the New Testament. You would come upon another Person being mentioned, called the Holy Spirit.
You would find that in that Book containing the history of the first years of Christianity—in that Book alone—this One called the Holy Spirit is referred to no fewer than seventy times. Now, that is enough to impress anybody: seventy times referred to.
Then go into these letters written by only one of these men—the epistles of the New Testament. Only one of them, whose name is Paul, refers to this One called the Holy Spirit no fewer than one hundred and twenty times. What is this? We are in the presence of Someone, or something.
Well, this would lead us to our conclusion. Christianity is evidently this: Jesus crucified, and truly dead.
May I say here, in parenthesis, that the Lord God saw to it that He was really crucified. He was really dead. You see, all the evidence is there; they killed Him right enough. There is no mistake about it. They tell us He was dead.
All the four narratives make it perfectly clear, and everything afterward refers to that. They make it perfectly clear that this was no mock thing, no sham thing. Jesus really died, and He was dead, and He was buried. There is no doubt about it.
Resurrection was not just resuscitation after a coma, or something like that. He was dead. Now, it is Jesus who was really dead, and you cannot, in all honesty, put anything else in place of that when you read this Book.
You have got to accept that He was crucified, and that He died, and that He was really dead and buried. Everybody knew that, at any rate. He was raised from the dead. Jesus was raised from the dead.
And He, in resurrection, was made real and true in the hearts of men and women and in their everyday experience by this One called the Holy Spirit.
Forgive me, friends, for talking to you as to little children. It sounds like a Sunday school, does it not? Do you know, this, after all, is the heart and essence of the Christian life. We know it as to its truth.
But there is, to the end, need—need—and, thank God, possibility of knowing this in a fuller and ever fuller way.
This one apostle, who spoke so much about it and who knew so much about it—more than all of us put together—right at the end of his life, when he was writing one of his last letters before his death, still said:
That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection.
Still more to know. When you know all that such a man knew, still more to know. This is the foundation of the Christian life.
But our imaginary person, in his inquiry, continues: “It is wonderful, and we can truly say more wonderful than the teaching of all the other great religionists and religions. Why not make, then, this superior teaching of Jesus the foundation of Christianity?”
“Why not make His character the foundation? He was such a good man. Look at these life stories. What a good man He was; what a kind man. Why not make His character the foundation of Christianity?”
“Why not make His heroic death the foundation? See Him laying down His life for His principles, for His truth, His teaching, for what He believed. For this He believed He was doing it for the good of other people, ready to die. Why not make death the foundation?”
You know quite well that people have tried to do that in each of these cases: make the real essence of Christianity the teaching, or the character, or the heroic death of Jesus. Why not make the resurrection the central thing?
Now we are getting nearer, you see. The answer to that question, dear friends, includes all the other realities of Christianity.
Inclusively, death is the end of everything, is it not? Death is the end of everything. There are many things that men can do for men, just provided that the men are alive.
If they are only alive, what a lot can be done for them. Even if they are only half alive, or have a corporal life, still we can do something. We say, “While there is life, there is hope.” While there is any bit of life remaining, you can do something.
But when the life has gone, you can do nothing. Oh, that you might try to do does not profit at all. This is the end of all that you can do. There is the end of everything. It is the end. You just have to close the book and say, “Finished.”
After that—well, nothing, unless God steps in. Nothing, unless there is an intervention of God.
Now, men are entirely put out of court with all they could do. They have to say, “We can do no more.” At the end of this period, now it is God’s matter. It is God’s matter, or it is nothing at all. There is no more. Only God can do anything now.
You see, that is just the beginning of Christianity. What is that?
If God had not stepped right in when Jesus was in the grave, there would have been none of all this that the world has come into and is coming into because of Him.
But God stepped in. It was God’s alone—power and prerogative—to raise the dead. Now it is utterly and absolutely and altogether of God, and nothing of man, nothing outside of God.
If Christianity begins there and is based there, then the Christian life is something which speaks of a mighty intervention of God and says, “I am today in this experience on the basis of something that only God Almighty could do.”
What I have is that which God alone, the Almighty, eternal God, could do. I am the fruit of that. My life rests on that. My Christianity is of that kind. It still rests, friends, upon an intervention of God Almighty when no one else could do anything at all.
I wonder if the experience of every one of us is like this. You know, the Lord takes pains to have it like that. That is why so many, when the crisis of their salvation has arrived, try to get through on all kinds of ground—their own works, their own activities and energies, and all the rest of it.
They never get through until they come to this place: only God can save me.