I have been speaking in the last week or so about this matter of reigning with Christ. The problem I have had is how, in the days that we have and the available time we have, to cover at least what one feels to be the essentials of this matter of reigning with Christ.
You remember that wonderful word in Luke 22:29, which is rendered in the New English Bible rather delicately:
Now I bestow on you the kingship
which My Father bestowed on Me.
We have been looking at some of the lives in which God has revealed and illustrated some of the lessons of kingship, or overcoming, or however you like to call it, reigning with Christ. We have looked at Abraham and seen something of the principle of the obedience of faith: that everything has got to be of God, and there has got to be an obedience of faith—absolute faith.
We have seen Isaac and the lesson that he illustrates of overcoming life: just being a receiver, one who has received and passes on—overcoming, reigning. We have seen Jacob and the great lesson of deliverance: that there has to be a transforming by the renewing of our mind. We have seen Joseph, and we have seen that there has to be a fellowship of His sufferings if we are to come to the throne.
Now, those four, in one sense, represent one whole phase of God’s dealing. I want to move on this morning, in the little time that we have, and just touch on another phase of God’s dealing: Moses and Joshua.
This morning we had read to us Exodus 15. Really, it is all there in Exodus 15:2:
The Lord is my strength and song,
And He is become my salvation:
This is my God, and I will praise Him;
My father’s God, and I will exalt Him.
And Exodus 15:13:
Thou in Thy lovingkindness hast led the people that Thou hast redeemed:
Thou hast guided them in Thy strength to Thy holy habitation.
The peoples have heard, they tremble:
Pangs have taken hold on the inhabitants of Philistia.
Then Exodus 15:16-18:
Terror and dread falleth upon them;
By the greatness of Thine arm they are as still as a stone;
Till Thy people pass over, O Lord,
Till the people pass over that Thou hast purchased.
Thou wilt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of Thine inheritance,
The place, O Lord, which Thou hast made for Thee to dwell in,
The sanctuary, O Lord, which Thy hands have established.
The Lord shall reign for ever and ever.
Really, that sums up the whole of this phase of God’s dealings, as represented in the lives of Moses and Joshua, in this matter of reigning with Christ. First delivered, redeemed, saved; and then brought in and planted in the place which Thou hast made for Thee to dwell in—Thy sanctuary, O Lord.
Oh, what a wonderful thing it is to know the object of our salvation. It is interesting that in this song of Moses, he speaks of the Passover not just being a getting out of Egypt, but a getting into the land. He speaks not merely about being delivered from the Egyptian, but being brought right through the wilderness and planted in the land— inheriting, coming to the place, the sanctuary of the Lord.
Really, that is the twofold lesson we need to get hold of this morning in this matter of kingship: to understand exactly what it is that God has done with us, and what is His objective in doing it.
Moses—Moshe in Hebrew—means “drawn out.” Some have tried to say that it is an old Egyptian name which means “son,” but it is much more likely that it just means “drawn out.” And, you know, dear child of God, if you are a child of God, that is written into your birthright: you have been drawn out.
And the wonderful thing is this: he was drawn out of water. Dear Moses had himself his own little exodus. Only he was in a little bulrush ark, as it were. He had his own exodus; it was in him. But whatever he could be used to lead the people of God through the Red Sea, he had in his own experience an experience of God that was written right into his very being.
And that is one of the great lessons of kingship: that you and I can never lead the people of God into anything until God does it first in us. We have to know something of the sovereignty of the Lord. We have to know something of the provision of the Lord. We have to know something of the deliverance of the Lord. We have to know something of the liberating power of the Lord, if we are to bring others out, if we are to see others delivered, if we are to see others saved, if we are to see others free. Do you understand? It is all part of this matter of redemption.
And what really is the lesson of Moses’ life? I mean now taking Moses, and not just the people. In actual fact, you will see all the way through Moses’ life and experience an identification between his experience and the people’s experience. There is no doubt to me that Moses’ whole life was determined by that tremendous encounter with the Lord when he was about eighty years of age.
It is recorded, of course, in Exodus 3. I will just read Exodus 3:2-6:
And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush:
And he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.
And Moses said, I will turn aside now, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.
And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses.
And he said, Here am I.
And He said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.
Moreover He said, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.
And Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God.
And Exodus 3:13-14:
And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is His name? what shall I say unto them?
And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM:
And He said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.
Now, to me, in this encounter of God with Moses, we have one of the greatest lessons in kingship that it is possible to learn. For really, that thornbush was Moses, and the flame of fire was God.
And what God was saying to Moses was this: “Until you, Moses—a dried-up, dead old thornbush—and I, the eternal fire, get together, nothing will be done. But once I get into you and become the flame of eternal fire, and you become eternal fuel for eternal fire, then the purpose of God for the nation and for the nations will be fulfilled.”
It is a lesson we find very, very hard to learn. You do not normally go to a Bible college to get turned out a dried-up old thornbush. You do not go to a theological seminary to be turned out a dried-up old thornbush. You do not somehow or other start studying the Bible to become a dried-up old thornbush. It is a lesson we learn very hardly.
It took the Lord forty solid years to get Moses from thinking that he was some magnificent, stately palm tree to where he recognized himself as a dried-up, dead old thornbush—a penny in the desert.
I often, as I have said to some of you before, used to wonder years ago why the Lord did not appear in another form. Would it not have been marvellous if it had been a stately palm tree? After all, there are quite a few palm trees in the Sinai wilderness. If there had been one of these magnificent straight palm trees, with its great fronds out, there ablaze with fire—and as Moses came near—by the way, he would not even have stopped for a while. He would have immediately seen it and gone, because it would have been a most unusual sight to see a palm tree on fire.
And then God said majestically, Moses looking down at him, “Moses, do not you come any nearer. The ground whereon you stand is holy.” And, you know, everyone who knows a little bit about their Bible would be thrilled with the biblical typology, because the palm tree is a symbol of holiness and righteousness and fruitfulness. Everyone would say, “Oh, how wonderful. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.”
And then they would have linked it with the law of God, and the holiness of God, and the truths of God, and the glory of God. It would have been absolutely marvellous—but the Lord did not do it.
And if He had chosen the acacia tree—the acacia tree is perhaps the most beautiful of the trees in the desert, delicate and very beautiful, and, I suppose, the only real tree you have in the southern part of the wilderness of Sinai. Of course, it is our shittim tree of the Authorized Version. Think if God had got into the shittim tree, and it blazed with fire, and the tree had not been consumed. Oh, we Bible students would have had a whale of a time.
We would have said, “There you are. You see, what God was saying to Moses was, ‘Moses, this is the tree out of which all the furniture of My dwelling place is going to be made. I am the fire, and this is you.’” But God did not choose the shittim tree.
Of course, we might have thought, although they do not exist in that part of the desert, the Lord could have chosen a vine or an olive tree, with all their spiritual significance and symbolism. But, you see, God chose the commonest, ugliest, most worthless of all the vegetation of the desert. Even a camel, if it can find something else to eat, will turn up its nose at a thornbush.
And God chose a thornbush and got into a thornbush. Now, I have never seen a thornbush taller than myself. Even when you see one such big one, it is really quite magnificent. Most of them are really scrubby little things.
Do you not see how amazing it was? They are close to the ground, close to the desert; not even a lovely green thornbush, not a thornbush flowering, but a thornbush that had lived its life and died. Its resources were drained; its energy was finished. It was a dried-up, dead old thornbush.
And there God got into the thornbush, so that later Moses said, “The grace of Him that dwelt in the bush.” He never called it a tree; he called it a bush. And God spoke to Moses, as it were, and said, “Moses, Moses.”
When Moses first saw that bush on fire, he undoubtedly just thought, “Oh, one of those thornbushes on fire. The sun has ignited it. Dead old thing—gone up in smoke.” And he went on keeping his sheep. But about ten minutes later, when he turned round, he thought, “Well, that is some thornbush,” and went on looking after the sheep. But about half an hour later, he thought, “I must turn aside to see this great sight. This is the biggest thornbush in the whole desert.”
And so he came across, and then God spoke not from above the thornbush, not from around the thornbush, but out of the midst of a common, ugly, worthless, dead thornbush. What was God saying? God was saying, “Moses, you thought because you were the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, brought up in the royal house, you thought you were a palm tree. You are not.”
“When first I got you out into this desert, you thought you were the shittim tree, an acacia tree, something that I could use. But you are not. Before ever I can make you a palm tree, before ever I can make you the acacia tree, you must first learn that you are a thorn.”
I say, that is the hardest lesson for believers to learn. Anyone who is coming to the throne has got to learn that they are nothing more than a dried-up old thornbush. There we are: two a penny.
Perhaps you said you wanted to reign with Christ in some glorious convention. Some great word came about authority—exercising authority in the name of the Lord—and you got so thrilled by it, so challenged by it. When the appeal was given, you stood up and said, “Yes, Lord, I want to exercise authority in Thy name.” And ever since then, everything has gone wrong.
Everything has gone wrong. You thought you were a palm tree. You thought, “Ah, yes, now is a new day for me. I stood up. It is a new day beginning.” It certainly was—only not quite the new day you thought.
What God began to do was say, “Yes, yes, yes. But before ever you can reign with Me, before ever you can exercise authority, you have got to come to the place where you know what you are naturally.” But that is only the first lesson.
God help us if we stay with what we are naturally. The second lesson is the flame of fire. For then, if we know that God is the flame of power, He is the glory, He is the power, He is the light, He is everything.
That is the second place. And the third lesson is that the dried-up, worthless thornbush and the flame of fire have got to get together. And the amazing thing is this: the thornbush remains the thornbush, and the fire remains fire.
And that is really the lesson of kingship: you will never have it in yourself. It is always the Lord in you. It is the hardest lesson to learn.
But Moses, you see—I remember years ago puzzling, and puzzling, and puzzling over this unmentionable name of God. I was never satisfied with those wonderful thoughts that were passed on to us by various preachers about the infinity of God: the fact that God has no beginning and no end, that He is infinite, that He is everywhere at the same time, that He knows everything.
They said, “That is what ‘I AM THAT I AM’ means. He has no beginning, He has no end. He is all-powerful, almighty. He is everywhere at the same time. Everything consists by Him.” But somehow it never, never, never satisfied me.
Until a little old Irish evangelist rolled into this place—and that really is the only way to explain Johnny Cochrane. He did not walk; he rolled. He had a stomach that was as large as his height. Oh, but what a lovely dear brother he was. Not so highly educated, but some of you will remember he preached one Sunday morning on “I AM THAT I AM,” and I thought to myself, “Whatever can he say about it?”
And he just said one thing that unlocked the whole matter for me. He said, “You know, I think God was giving Moses a blank cheque. ‘I AM.’ Add what you need.”
“Do you need love? I AM love. Do you need power? I AM power. Do you need grace? I AM grace. Do you need life? I AM life. Do you need light? I AM the light of the world.”
Then suddenly everything fell into place. Jesus: “I am the bread of life.” Jesus: “I am the light of the world.” Jesus said, “Before Abraham was, I am.” John later wrote this: “God is light. God is love.”
Certainly, the whole thing fell into place. We are the thornbush; God is the I AM in us. Everything we need, we can add to the I AM. What a name! Now it is transformed.
Of course, God has no beginning and no end. Of course, God is everywhere at the same time. Of course, God knows everything. But that does not necessarily help me. I know nothing. Well, I know God knows everything. I cannot be everywhere. Sometimes I wish I could, but I cannot be. I am a little, finite, created bit of clay. I am tied to one place. Sometimes I wish I had a hundred bodies to run around with; then I expect I would get into a greater mess than I am.
I do not find that, simply to know that God in His majesty and His infinity is something that makes me bow before Him and worship Him—that I recognize absolutely—but it does not meet my need.
But when I find that the I AM THAT I AM has vouchsafed to me everything that He is, and says, “I will get into you. I will be in you. I will breathe through you. I will love through you. I will speak through you. I will work through you. I will be everything in you, if only you will be a thornbush.”
“If only you will recognize that you are not even a living thornbush, but a dried, dead old thornbush. You let Me get into you; I will do the work. And through you, the two of us together—the flame of fire in the thornbush—will see the purpose of God fulfilled. We will see nations touched. We will see His will done on earth as it is in heaven. We will see His kingdom come.”
It is a great lesson. It is a great lesson: kingship.
Of course, Israel had to learn it too. They also knew what it was to be drawn out of Egypt. Moses’ name means “drawn out”; Israel was drawn out of Egypt, redeemed with so great a redemption.
And, you know, the wonderful thing is this about being drawn out of Egypt: God immediately began to teach what He had taught Moses; now He began to teach them.
They could not get across that Red Sea. They just could not get across. God had to do it. Moses stood there with a little rod and lifted it, and spoke a few words, and the east wind blew, and the sea was piled up. They went across as on dry ground. And what was their deliverance became the destruction of the Egyptian host.
Oh, it is really amazing, is it not? God began to teach those people they could not save themselves, poor things. No sooner had they eaten the Passover lamb and the angel of death had passed over them than they had their first big problem: they could not get across the sea, and only the Lord could do it.
But no sooner were they at the other side than they had the next great problem. They had no water. They came to a place where the water was bitter, and they could not drink; it would only make them more thirsty than ever. Then they began to grumble and moan, and then a tree was thrown in, and the water became sweet. It was the Lord—Christ crucified.
Later on, it was water out of the rock—Christ crucified. It was manna miraculously provided, six days out of seven, and on the sixth day two portions.
And then it was a pillar of cloud and fire. Have you ever heard of anything like it? They had no committees. They had no councils, no great sessions of, “Shall we go this way? Shall we go that way? What do you think? So-and-so thinks this; so-and-so thinks that; so-and-so thinks, from past history, we should do this.”
No, not at all. The Lord was their guidance. As soon as they saw Him moving, they packed up the tent and were on the move. The Lord was everything. All the way through forty years in the wilderness, He was everything. You see, what He taught Moses, He now taught them.
It is a wonderful lesson, this matter of kingship, as we see it in the life of Moses. And there is a lot more I could say about Moses. I could talk about his intercession—his intercession.
What a wonderful word it was in Exodus 32:32, when he said:
Yet now, if Thou wilt forgive their sin—and if not, blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book which Thou hast written.
This was not the old Moses. This was a new Moses. This was a new Moses in whom the Lord was everything, and the Spirit of Christ in him exhibited the very same nature that later the Lord Jesus was to express when He laid down His life for us all.
That is kingship: no self-glory, no self-ambition, no self-interest, no pomp and show, no “I am here. I have got this title. I have got this status. I have got this background.” No. It is service—true service. This kind of king exists for the people.
Of course, we could go on saying much more about Moses, but let us just say something about Joshua. For when we come to Joshua, we have the second part of the story.
I think most of you know that Joshua is the Hebrew for the Greek Jesus. It is the Old Testament form of Jesus: “The Lord is salvation.” And the wonderful thing about Joshua is that he illustrates the other side of the coin.
Now then, have you learned that the Lord is your salvation—not that He gives salvation, not only that He saves, but He is your salvation? You have learned that you are nothing and that God is everything, and the two of you together. Now you must go in and inherit.
And that is the great lesson of Joshua. You must go over, and you must possess your possessions. You must inherit your inheritance. You must go in by faith, using the soles of your feet, and take what is yours.
Dear child of God, all this business about whether there is a second experience, or whether there is a second blessing, or whether there is a baptism of the Spirit, or whether there is a whatever else—my dear, it is solved, in my estimation, in just this one simple thing: of course the Lord has given you everything, but unless you go in and possess, you will not experience it. You have got to go in and possess.
For the Lord said in Joshua 1:3-4:
Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, to you have I given it, as I spake unto Moses.
From the wilderness and this Lebanon even unto the great river, the river Euphrates,
All the land of the Hittites, and unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun,
Shall be your border.
Now, it is the soles of your feet that matter. You see, you can start to say, “Ah, thank God, all I am is an old dried-up thornbush.” And then you say, “Yes, and the Lord is everything.”
And, you know, there are people who say that, and they have not got much. Naturally, we, who are perhaps a little more critical at times, wonder, “Well, why do they all the time say they have got everything when they are so dreary?”
I mean, these people who say, “Oh, you have got everything in the Lord. I do not need any more. I have got everything.” But they are so dreary. Their lives are so colourless, they are so drab, they are so unoriginal. There does not seem to be—you do not touch the Lord in them. What is wrong?
I am not asking for all just emotion and excitement and all that kind of thing. But what I mean is this: it is not good enough to learn a lesson that the Lord is everything and that you are nothing. Now the Lord in you has got to go forward.
And you have got to put the sole of your foot down. You will never get across the Jordan this time. Is it not interesting? The time before it was a little rod; this time it was feet. Feet had to get wet, my dear friend. Have you got your feet wet yet?
Some people have got over the Red Sea, but they have not got their feet wet in Jordan. But until you put the soles of your feet down, the water will never pile up at Adam.
But once you put the soles of your feet down, then that which God has done in Christ—in crucifying your old man, in putting away the old man, in abolishing, as it were, the old Adam—until you put your faith down, it cannot be made real in your life.
You cannot know the ark of the covenant and all its glory and power. You cannot know the walls of Jericho coming down. You cannot know what it is to say with Joshua, “Give me this mountain.”
It says in Hebrews 6:12:
That ye be not sluggish, but imitators of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises.
Faith and patience: inheriting the promises. At the beginning, when they put their feet down in the River Jordan, they did not need too much patience. Because the moment the soles of their feet went down onto the riverbed, the water piled up at Adam—now the Damia Bridge—and they went over.
But they needed a bit of patience when they came to Jericho. I mean, you can just hear the legalists, cannot you? “Now look here, Joshua, you have got this whole thing wrong. You are going back; you are going back on the law.”
“It only needed—the Lord said, ‘Every place that the sole of your foot treads upon, that will I give you.’ All we had to do was put the soles of our feet down, and the water was immediately cut off. Now what is all this about going down once a day for six days and seven times on the seventh day, in the heat of Jericho? You must be crazy.”
“How awful to go round and round Jericho! I could not bear it. Round and round Jericho, once a day—that is bad enough for six days—but seven times on the seventh day? I think this is just unbelief. I think we could get this thing settled in an instant if we had enough faith. Blow the trumpets, put our feet down, blow the trumpets, and see the walls come down.”
But there are times when it takes a good deal more than one putting of the sole of your foot down to see the Lord act. You have to have faith and patience, and then you inherit the promise.
Now, what does Joshua teach us? Joshua just teaches us this one simple lesson: that once we know what it is to be saved, and once we have begun to learn the lesson that we are nothing and God is everything, and it is a union between God and us that is the key to it all, then we must go over the Jordan and possess the promises of God.
We shall never see the house of God built in the desert. We shall never see the purpose of God fulfilled in forty years of going round. But is it not true, dear friends, that much of our church life is just an endless going round a wilderness—not for forty years, but four hundred?
Round and round, and always knowing the Lord, never possessing. Is it not true of your life and my life that many of us are ever learning and never coming to a knowledge of the truth? We learn, and we learn, and we learn, but we never possess.
And our great need from the life of Joshua is this: that if you and I are going to come to the throne, we have to learn to possess. And you do it with the soles of your feet, figuratively speaking.
There is another matter, and I will just mention it. There are two things; I will just leave them with you. One is this: Joshua and Caleb possessed the land because they were of another spirit.
That you and I could ponder on for a long, long time. For the key to possessing our inheritance is the gracious ministry of the Holy Spirit—Captain of the Lord’s host, Angel of His presence.
Oh, dear child of God, do not be afraid of the person of the Holy Spirit. Do not be put off by what is excessive, extreme, or false. But do not be put off by that.
Neither, on the other hand, somehow or other just feel that the Holy Spirit is some agent. It is amazing to me how the people of God give a place to the Father, and they give a place to the Son, and they hardly give any place to the Holy Spirit, as if the Spirit of God is some impersonal agent that just does things, you know, almost without being a person.
But it is the person of the Father, and the person of the Lord Jesus, and the person of the Holy Spirit. You grieve the Holy Spirit when you treat Him as a thing, as an “it.”
Another spirit. You see, no one can have real faith without the Spirit of God. Those spies, when they went into the land—ten of them came back—they just did have no faith. They had no faith at all.
They said, “We cannot do it. We cannot do it. It is a beautiful land, flowing with milk and honey, but it is fortified to the heavens. The people are like giants. We cannot do it.”
But two of them, Joshua and Caleb, said, “We are well able. For if the Lord is with us, we shall inherit,” because they were of another spirit.
There is one other thing about this matter of Joshua, and it is an uncomfortable one. It is Achan. Because where there is sin, there will be a paralyzing of any inheritance.
And you cannot bury it. Achan stole things, poor man. He stole them, and then he buried them in his tent. Is it not silly? Is not sin a stupidity?
He took those things, and he could not wear them. He could not sell them. They were beautiful Babylonian garments, shekels, money. He could never do anything with it.
Many of us do that kind of thing. We fall into sin, and then we bury it. There is no satisfaction. There is no fulfilment. There is only an awful sense of living a façade, being a hypocrite.
But do not think because you buried it out of your sight, it is out of the sight of God. For God sees what is buried in every home.
It is buried, but God sees it. And sooner or later, your whole life will hinge upon that matter being settled.
So it was with Achan, and that is why one of the prophets calls the Valley of Achor a door of hope. Thank God, there is Someone else who was stoned to death for us.
But the principle is still the same: that if we have sinned, or fallen to sin, and there is something buried in our lives, or in our family circumstances or home, that thing, until it comes out into the light and is judged and put away by the finished work of Christ, by the blood of the Lamb, will effectively stop you from entering in and will stop the people of God from entering in.
So we learn the lesson of Joshua and Moses in this whole matter of kingship. God has vested in you and in me the kingship which His Father vested in Him. He said:
To him that overcometh will I grant to sit down with Me in My throne,
Even as I also overcame, and sat down with My Father in His throne.
May the Lord help us. I am quite sure that there is so much for us to possess. There is a fullness in Christ for many of us to possess. There is an anointing of the Holy Spirit that many of us need to possess. There is a ministry, whatever it is, that we need to possess. There is a functioning in the body of Christ which we need to possess.
There are enemies that we need to put our feet down upon their necks and see them destroyed. There are areas that need to be brought under the domain of the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ. Oh, there are so many things we need to possess, are there not? Things personal, things family, things to do with us locally, things to do with the people of God nationally, and in the whole world.
Oh, God could bring us to the place where we know something of reigning with Christ. It would be a new chapter. Learn the lesson of Moses, learn the lesson of Joshua, and then we shall know something of entering in and possessing what the Lord has so dearly won for us.
Shall we pray?
Father, Thou knowest every life here. There is nothing hid from Thee. Thou knowest, Lord, all the various things in our lives that hold us up. Sometimes, Lord, it is just simply ignorance. We just did not know we had to possess anything.
Other times, Lord, it is humility. We just feel that somehow we are so unworthy and so insignificant that, Lord, we could never possess anything. But, Lord, wilt Thou teach us? Wilt Thou teach us, Lord, this day, that this has been won for us, and wilt Thou help us to learn the lesson of Moses and the lesson of Joshua?
And Lord, if there is sin in our lives like Achan’s sin, buried—some skeleton in the cupboard—help us, Lord, to get it dealt with, out in the open, settled, put away, that the Valley of Achor may become a door of hope.
Oh, Father, hear us, we pray, as together now we give ourselves to Thee with thanksgiving, in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.