If you will turn with me to Isaiah, the prophecies of Isaiah, and chapter 43. We will read together the first two verses of this chapter.
But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob,
And He that formed thee, O Israel: Fear not, for I have redeemed thee;
I have called thee by thy name; thou art Mine.When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee;
And through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee:
When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned;
Neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.— Isaiah 43:1-2
Shall we just bow together in a word of prayer?
Heavenly Father, we are so glad that, when it comes to the speaking of Your Word and the hearing of Your Word, You have not left us to our own energies, or to our own talents or gifts. But You have provided us, speaker and hearer, with an anointing. We want to come very simply to avail ourselves of that anointing this evening.
We thank You, Lord, that Your divine grace and power can so tabernacle upon us that, Lord, Your purpose can be fulfilled, Your intention and design in our time realised. And that is what we ask, Lord: not for just some routine, but a meeting with Yourself.
We pray, Lord, that Your Holy Spirit will Himself tabernacle upon our physical weakness and cause the beauty and grace of our Lord Jesus to be communicated to us. We ask it in His precious name. Amen.
The little phrase that has burnt its way into my heart, for the times that I am responsible for the ministry of the Word, is contained in this first verse of Isaiah 43: “Thou art Mine.” Thou art Mine.
There are four ways in which the Lord claims us as His own:
These are the four ways in which, at least, the Lord has shown something of this matter to me, and I am seeking by His grace to share and communicate it to you.
Last night we took this little phrase: “But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob.” What a marvellous thing it is just to recognise that the Lord comes down to the lowest denominator when He names Jacob.
Some of us would almost feel that, as far as anything to do with the Lord is concerned, it does not begin with our fallen nature. He does not begin with us in the natural; it only begins when we are born again. But the claim the Lord makes is this: “But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob.”
Evil though Jacob was, fallen and twisted, still the Lord had a claim on him because He was his Creator. It is a marvellous thing for us to consider that our whole being, the way we are constituted as human beings, is by the creative power of God.
He has created us spirit, soul, and body. And He intends, in the end, that we should know spirit and soul and body preserved entire to the coming of the Lord.
There are a whole lot of errors amongst Christians connected with this matter of spirit, soul, and body. There are those who believe we are only two beings. Interestingly enough, it comes out of the whole higher criticism movement.
They consider that the Old Testament only reveals us as bipartite, and that spirit is just another name for soul. They added a further word in the New Testament, but in actual fact, we are only soul and body.
But this makes mockery of words such as those found in Hebrews 4:12, about the Word of God being sharper than any two-edged sword, dividing between soul and spirit.
And why does Paul make such a fuss about our being preserved entire—spirit, and soul, and body? What emphasis he makes! I believe it is very, very important for us to understand this whole matter, and we began to look at it last night.
It is a wonderful thing to recognise that our whole personality—what we are, even though fallen, even though perhaps devalued, even though defaced in one sense—still hears the Lord say, “But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob.”
So the Lord has a tremendous interest in every one of us. We must never despise any part of our being. It is for our whole being that our Lord died, and it is the whole being that He wants to save.
Now this evening, let us look at this second matter:
But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob,
And He that formed thee, O Israel: Fear not, for I have redeemed thee.— Isaiah 43:1
The forming of Israel out of Jacob—only God could do that. Moses could not do it. None of the prophets could do it. Not even the apostles could do it. Nobody could ever form an Israel out of Jacob.
Nobody could form a prince with God—not only by pedigree, not only by blood, but by character, by essential inward character. Nobody but God could take a Jacob and form him into an Israel.
And that is exactly what God has done with you and me. Some of us may not yet recognise that we are Jacobs. We might consider ourselves, “I cannot be a Jacob.” But if we go on with the Lord, we shall have to come to the conclusion that we are Jacobs by nature.
The marvellous thing is that God takes Jacobs—only God could ever conceive of such a thing—and forms Israel out of them.
There is only one explanation for this determination of God to form Israel out of Jacob. If I was the Lord, I would have finished with Jacob. I would have started all over again with better material.
Why bother with twisted, deceiving, supplanting material? Well, just be done with it. Start all over again with something nice and pure, something nice and clean, something with no twistedness in it.
If I was the Lord, I would never put up with the murmuring of God’s people. I would boot them out. I would give them one or two warnings and then boot the lot out.
But that is because I do not have the grace that God has.
It is an amazing thing to come to one conclusion, and one conclusion only: that it is abounding, fathomless, amazing, unmerited, undeserved grace.
Only grace of that kind could take a person like Jacob and form an Israel out of him. Think of the patience required. Think of the wisdom required. Think of the power required. Think of the determination required.
And yet it is the Lord who says, “But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob, and He that formed thee, O Israel: fear not, for I have redeemed thee.”
It is the redeeming grace and power of God that settles its love upon a Jacob and forms an Israel out of the most unlikely material.
If God had wanted to, when Adam fell, He could have blown the whole creation to smithereens with one great divine nuclear explosion—blasted the whole thing into smithereens—and then, by another word, started all over again.
But God is not like that. The glory of God is that He perseveres. He is determined. We can only call this the determination of divine love. There is no other explanation for it.
I have long since given up trying philosophically, or even theologically, to understand the words, “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.”
I can only understand this extraordinary thing about love. I have never been able to understand what some people love in somebody else. You know, I see the most extraordinary things as one goes round the world.
I mean, you see men in love with women that are cross-eyed, shapeless, and they are absolutely in love with them; and women in love with men that really make one wonder, “What do they see in the man?” But love is the most extraordinary thing, is it not?
Love is the most extraordinary thing. It is not in the Bible, but we know so well the words, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” In one sense, we have to say that about God.
I do not know why He loves you, or why He loves me. Sometimes I used to think I understood more why He loved me than why He loved you. But as I have gone on with the Lord, I have come to the conclusion that it is amazing that He loves me.
I do not know what He sees. Why did He not finish with us and start all over again with something not quite so twisted, someone not quite so rebellious, someone not quite so devious, someone not quite so difficult?
Do you know that sometimes it takes the Lord a lifetime to get some of us to our Jabbok? If the Lord could get us there at the beginning of our Christian life, He could change us with our whole life in front. But no, we are such devious, difficult people.
We fight with the Lord. We wrestle with the Lord. We avoid the Lord. We refuse to face the issue. Sometimes it is a lifetime before the Lord gets us finally on the deathbed.
And yet, it is all worth it, apparently, to the Lord, if He finally gets us.
So I think of this amazing thing: the forming of Israel out of Jacob. If I could think of Jacob as something on one side and Israel as something altogether different, it would make it a little easier. But in actual fact, Israel is only Jacob with another name.
But he is more than another name. Something has happened to Jacob. He is still Jacob, and God is still pleased to call Himself the God of Jacob, and still says, “I love Jacob.” But Israel is Jacob only as the grace of God has transformed him.
To put it in New Testament terms, he is being conformed to the image of God’s Son.
Now, my dear friend, you can go to a thousand seminaries, go to a thousand theological courses, attend a thousand different denominational meetings, and then leave them for interdenominational meetings, and then leave them for nondenominational meetings.
It is all without any worth at all unless you are being conformed to the image of God’s Son. You can discuss theology until you are blue in the face. You can split the finer points of the Word of God.
You can preach. You can exercise faith. You can understand mysteries. But if you are not being changed, it is worthless.
For in the end, it is not the position you held down here, or the status you occupied, or the status given to you. It is whether the Lord is forming Israel out of Jacob.
One day, when this little life is all over and gone, you will look back and see that the only thing that was worthwhile in this life was the work God did in you and me in conforming us to the image of His Son, because that is forever.
Everything else falls away. Everything. The job that wanted you, the career you are fighting for, the reputation you are seeking to uphold, even the money that you have, will dissolve with death.
Nothing goes through into eternity but what God does in your life and in my life. Jacob, in himself, though created spirit, soul, and body, though originally created in the image of God, cannot inherit the kingdom of God.
Only Israel can inherit the kingdom of God. Only when God has conformed you to the image of His Son can you inherit the kingdom of God. Only what God, by His Spirit, has done in you and in me is the thing that goes through into eternity to come.
It is the work of God to turn sinners into saints. Now, I do not mean those pale, emaciated, effeminate-looking creatures that stare down at us from stained-glass windows.
When I was a child, the only idea that I ever had of Christianity was that. I thought all Christians were pale, emaciated, and spineless.
Of course, it is true that an awful lot of God’s people are pale and calamitous. They have a kind of religious spirit, a kind of artificial Christianity, that altogether inhibits them from becoming the people that God wants them to be.
That is why the Lord’s people sometimes are so uninteresting, and, as Dana said this morning, why the world can be so interesting. The world, in its fallen state—at least they are real people: wicked, cunning, deviant, but real.
But when you come into some of these Christian assemblies, you do not meet real people; you only meet shadows, projected images of what they consider spiritual. No, I am not talking about that kind of saint.
The saints that God is making out of sinners are real people. They are the kind of people that Matthew was. He was a tax collector. I have never yet met a tax collector who is not a bit of a character.
And Jewish tax collectors are undoubtedly the best in the world.
Or take Peter, the fisherman. I have always found two types of men in my travels that are quite interesting: fishermen and shepherds. I go to New Zealand, and I find I have never yet met one of those fellows who is a shepherd who is not an interesting character.
It is the same with fishermen. Whether it is being close to the elements, I do not know. But Peter was a character, and he remained one to the end.
Remember when he had that bust-up with Paul publicly over whether to be kosher or not to be kosher? Then, at the end, he wrote a letter and said, “Our beloved brother Paul,” who writes things “hard to be understood.”
So many Christians would not dream of saying anything like that. I mean, that would be a little bit too beyond that kind of thing.
But again, I think of Paul. He was an incredible character, was he not? The man is a saint—not only by position, but in character—just as Peter had become a saint, not just in position but in character.
Israel had been formed out of Jacob in them. I think of Paul: he is such a real person. He writes in one of his letters, “You are pushing me to boast.”
Now, how many Christians would ever write a letter like that, I ask you? Especially if they had read a few books by Mr. Sparks. They would not dream of saying, “You are pushing me to boast.”
Paul writes to the Corinthians and says, “You are just getting me into such a position, I have got to boast. I do not come one whit behind any of these other big people you call apostles.” Then he goes through the whole catalogue.
I imagine Paul, after he posted the letter, having a bad time. He did not realise that it was Scripture. I can just imagine him having such a bad time, rolling in bed, thinking, “Oh, how ever did I do that? What a dreadful thing I said, letting the cat out of the bag like that. I should never have done it.”
And suppose some angel had said to him, “Paul, all down the centuries saints are going to study what you have written.”
This is not a stained-glass saint. This is a real saint: a man who has been a sinner turned into a saint—an Israel formed out of a Jacob.
That is why I say, even if our meetings down here are fearfully boring at times, heaven will never be boring. Just imagine it: we have Jacob there, and Moses and David, and I think of that extraordinary lady I wish to meet—you know, the one who drove a peg through the gentleman’s head.
And many others like that. Oh, my dear friend, some Christians are going to get such a shock when they get up there. I think of even some of the saints I have known myself in my little life—real things, not these stained-glass things.
Now, my dear friends, God is not interested in the artificial, the unreal, the pseudo, the façade. He is interested in Jacob.
“What is thy name?” said the angel of the Lord when he wrestled with Jacob. Now, is that not silly? As if the angel of the Lord did not know who he was wrestling with.
I mean, the Lord had said to him, “Now get down there. He is going to come to that Jabbok, and you get a grip on him and do not let him go. Now, you know who it is, do you not? Jacob! It is not Esau. It is Jacob you are going to get hold of.”
Then the angel says, “What is thy name?”
Of course, the whole point was not for the angel’s sake. He knew exactly who he was wrestling with. It was to find out whether Jacob had finally come down to the basis of total reality.
He could have said, “I am Abraham’s grandson.” That would have got him some credit. Or maybe he could have said, “I am Isaac’s son.” But he said, “My name is Jacob.”
Then the Lord said, “That is enough. Thou shalt no more be Jacob; thou shalt be Israel.”
It is the glory of God to turn sinners into saints. The process is costly, but it is the glory of God to turn sinners into saints.
In Romans 8:29-30, we read:
For whom He foreknew, He also foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son,
That He might be the firstborn among many brethren:
And whom He foreordained, them He also called:
And whom He called, them He also justified:
And whom He justified, them He also glorified.
Foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son. So all the predestinating grace and power of God is behind the transformation of Jacob into Israel.
Jacob—the very name in Hebrew, Ya‘aqob, means “twister.” That is how I put it colloquially. Actually, to put it in King James English, it means “supplanter.”
If you read the story, when Jacob was born, he was born with his hand around his brother’s heel, seeking somehow or other to pull his brother back so that he could be first. He did not quite manage it. And they called him Jacob: twister, supplanter.
It was the grace of God that took Jacob the supplanter and turned him into the builder. Because in Jewish tradition Jacob is called the builder of the house of Israel.
There is such a difference between a destroyer, a supplanter, and a builder. Can you think of anything more disparate? A supplanter or a destroyer, and a builder.
Jacob destroyed his brother’s birthright. You remember, he stole it. Of course, Esau sold it, as the old King James Version puts it, “for a mess of pottage.” That is how much Esau thought of it; that is how much he valued it. But nevertheless, Jacob destroyed his brother’s birthright.
Later, he stole his brother’s blessing. What a story! Mother was in on the act, stitching things up all night. She chose a bit of goatskin; it had to be very special. She must have gone looking all around the flocks to find the special texture.
Then she spent the whole time sewing it exactly so that it would go like a glove over Jacob’s arms. Poor old blind Isaac would feel the arms of Jacob and think it was Esau.
Rebekah and Jacob, both in on the act, planning the whole thing together in the family—to destroy. You do not call that a builder of the house of Israel.
You do not ever build the house of God by stealing another’s birthright, by supplanting others. The house of God is not a place for ambition, a place where we push others down in order to come up. That is not the house of God.
Yet this Jacob becomes the builder of the house of Israel. Forever afterwards, God’s chosen people are called by his new name: Israel.
Or again, I think of Jacob the twister, the twisted. This Jacob becomes the blesser and the worshipper.
In Hebrews 11:21 we read:
By faith Jacob, when he was dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph;
And worshipped, leaning upon the top of his staff.
The Hebrew actually says leaning on his bedpost. But whether it was his staff or his bedpost does not really matter. The fact of the matter is that Jacob had been touched in his thigh, and his thigh was put out of joint for the rest of his life.
But the twister had become a blesser, and the twister had become a worshipper. Is there anything more disparate, more different, than a person who is a twister, or twisted, and someone who blesses other people?
Have you ever met anybody who is a twister who has been a blessing? I have not. They normally lift things off you; they do not give things, do they?
That was very true of Jacob. He lifted his brother’s birthright; he lifted his brother’s blessing; he lifted his uncle’s sheep and goats. That was his nature: acquisitive. He was always acquiring.
He could not help it; it was his nature. He did not sit down and think out the methods by which he acquired things. He had such a feeling of desire and covetousness to get the thing that, as long as he got it, that was all that mattered.
But at the end of his life, this Jacob becomes a blesser. When he blesses those two sons of Joseph, it is a real blessing. Something comes upon them that never leaves them.
I think one of the most beautiful chapters in the whole of the Old Testament is Genesis 49, when Jacob blesses his twelve sons one by one. Oh, it is such a prophetic revelation, such a word of knowledge, such a word of wisdom.
It is such an insight into the future and destiny of each of those men and of the tribes that would come out of them. He has become a blesser. The old twister has become a blesser. Only God could form a blesser out of a twister.
And it says of him too that he worshipped. Now, my dear friends, have you ever noticed that when there is a lot of twistedness in us, we cannot worship?
Worship, by its very nature, takes us out of ourselves. Just as we give blessing to one another, so when we worship, we give to God. When we are twisted and a twister, or whatever else, we cannot do it.
Something has happened to the twister: he has become a worshipper.
I always found it very amazing when Jacob was first sent away from his family and fled for his life from his twin brother Esau. He lay down in a place just north of Jerusalem. He took one of the stones for a pillow—and to this day there are so many stones there, you would have no problem selecting one.
He took a stone, put his head on it, and went into a weary, restless sleep. And he saw the Lord, you remember.
Then he said, “This is none other than the house of God,” and he was afraid. He built an altar, called the place Bethel—the house of God—and said, “Lord, if You will only keep me in this journey that I make, I will come back here and I will build You a house.”
You see, he could not help it: tit for tat. He wanted something. “You look after me, Lord; I will look after You. You keep me in the country I am going to, and I will build You a house.”
But at the end of his life, he was a worshipper.
Now I have to watch the time, but I think this is such a wonderful thing, this whole matter of Israel being formed out of Jacob. I do not know whether it means anything to you, but to me it means something, because I think for myself: if He can do it with Jacob, He can do it with me.
“Fear not, for I have redeemed thee.” Have you ever thought about why the Lord says, “Fear not”?
But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob,
And He that formed thee, O Israel: Fear not, for I have redeemed thee.— Isaiah 43:1
Is that an intimation that there are times when Jacob wonders, “Can the redeeming grace of God, and the love of God, persevere with me? Am I perhaps too twisted for even God? Too complex for the Lord?”
“Maybe my genetic history is too much of a problem for the Lord—the kind of personality I have got, the type of temperament I have got, the family life I have had. Mother—she was some lady, Rebekah. Of course, you see it in her brother, Laban.”
We know the family, in a way. They are all part of the same family—quite remarkable people.
I wonder whether there is a little intimation: “Fear not, for I have redeemed thee.” Is there not an intimation that there were times when perhaps Jacob would be tempted to say, “I am too much for the Lord. Better for Him to find a Moses. Better for Him to find someone like my father Isaac, someone like Enoch.”
Fear not, Jacob. I have redeemed thee.
Now, this word redemption, which every Christian, I imagine, knows very well, is in fact a word that somehow has become devalued amongst us. I do not think we always realise what a wonderful word redemption is.
Salvation has within it the idea of being made whole. But redemption has within it, in Hebrew, the idea of being retrieved, recovered, liberated—but not just liberated: retrieved.
When the children of Israel went into Egypt, they became slaves to Pharaoh. They became his bondservants, and God redeemed them with an outstretched arm by His power.
The idea was that they were the Lord’s, and somehow or other they had come into a place where they should never have been. They were God’s servants; they were God’s sons. But they had become bondslaves of the powers of darkness.
They had become involved in this world, part and parcel of the fabric and system of this world. Then God said, “I will redeem them. I will bring them up out of Egypt. I will send My servant Moses to Pharaoh and say, ‘Let My people go.’”
In this word, redemption is all this glorious thought of retrieving, recovering, freeing, delivering.
If you were a slave in the market, you could be redeemed if someone would only pay the price.
You and I were all slaves in the market of this world when we were, just by nature, Jacob. Though marked out by the love of God, chosen before the foundation of the world, still we were lost in sin, dead in trespasses and sins.
Then comes the Redeemer. Moses could never have been the Redeemer, nor could any of the prophets. The only One who could redeem us was Jesus.
“Fear not,” the Lord says to you and to me, “I have redeemed thee. Thou art Mine.”
You know, the price the Lord paid for you was total. Do you know the Lord would have paid that price if you had been the only one? That is the whole point in telling the story of the man who had one hundred sheep: ninety-nine were safe and one was out.
The Lord has redeemed you. Do not fear. If God has given so much to retrieve you, to recover you, to liberate you, do you not think that He is going to put at your disposal every single bit of grace and power you need to be conformed to the image of God’s Son?
Now that leads me to say a little bit more about redemption. It is a very interesting thing when we look in the New Testament.
Take Romans 3:23-24. Listen to this:
For all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God;
Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
The redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
Turn to Ephesians 1:7:
In Whom we have our redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses.
Or again, Colossians 1:14:
In Whom we have our redemption, the forgiveness of our sins.
Now that is very interesting because in the verses just before, this is what he says:
Who delivered us out of the power of darkness,
And translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His love;
In Whom we have our redemption, the forgiveness of our sins.
I do not know why, but the work of the cross in its fullness is often looked upon as kindergarten amongst believers. The tragedy is that in today’s Christianity there is very little understanding of justification.
Because we imagine that it is somehow something to do with kindergarten, we think, “Well, we know all about that. We want the deeper thing.” But God can never start to form Israel out of Jacob unless He has a very solid foundation upon which Jacob can stand whilst the work is being done.
It is all very well to talk about being crucified with Christ. It is all very well to talk about laying down one’s life for Him, for His sake and for the gospel. It is all very well to talk about falling into the ground and dying. It is all very well to talk about being broken.
But woe betide anyone who begins to experience the subjective work of the cross if he does not know the objective work of the cross.
Let me put it another way. If you do not know what it is to be justified through the death of the Lord Jesus on the cross, then once the Holy Spirit starts to apply the work of the cross subjectively, in the way that you have got to learn to die, you will come to a place where you will break up.
No man, no woman, can ever see themselves as God sees them unless they know that they are justified. If God were to take aside the veil and show you what you are, you would go into a mental home within days.
We are all so self-righteous. You have no idea how self-righteous we all are. We do not recognise what we are capable of. We only think so-and-so is capable of that, and so-and-so is capable of that. We would never think ourselves capable of the same things.
But God knows the depths that are within us. He could never show Jacob what he was like until he reached a certain place in his life.
Jacob was scandalised by his uncle Laban. He could not believe it. “I worked for him,” he said, “for years. I gave my hands to the bone that I might marry his younger daughter. And then that big-time twister dressed up Leah to look like Rachel and married off his older daughter, who would have been left on the shelf anyway, to me.”
If it was not in the Bible, you would not believe it, would you? You just would not believe it.
People with a Western tradition always come and say, “I do not understand. How did Jacob not spot that it was Leah?” Well, first of all, they did not have electricity in those days. Secondly, they did not belong to the Temperance Society.
I am not saying that Jacob was drunk. I am just saying that the wedding rites used to go on for a whole week.
It was the biggest shock poor old Jacob ever got when he woke up in the morning and there she was: Leah, not Rachel. He was scandalised. “How could your own flesh and blood do something like that? My uncle, my mother’s brother!”
“I mean, if he was just an employer, I would understand it. But my own flesh and blood—my uncle—he twisted me over the matters of the heart.”
“To twist me out of money, I can understand. Twist me out of property, I can understand. But to twist me out of the one person I desired to be joined to and live with—it is scandalous.”
Apparently Jacob never sat down and thought, “You know, it was my twin brother—not even merely my brother, my twin brother—I stole the birthright from. It was my twin brother and my godly, half-blind father that I deceived.” It never entered his head.
In the Lord’s work, I have often been surprised how blind people I work with are to themselves. Of course, they think I am blind to myself. But is it not amazing just how blind we sometimes are to what is glaringly obvious to everybody who knows us?
Why do you think the Lord did not tear aside the whole veil right at the beginning and say, “Jacob, come and stand here. I am going to draw aside the veil, and I am going to show Jacob as he really is”?
Poor old Jacob would have gone clean out of his head. He would have reeled under the impact of seeing what he really was, right in such a way that it would have blown his whole mental health and balance.
God is often hampered with you and me. He cannot really start to show us what we are like in such a way that we say, “Lord, I will not let You go until You do something. I have no other answer but to go on with You.”
“I cannot go back, Lord. Now I have seen what I am like, there is no going backward. I have got to go on. And if You do not do something to me, then, Lord, I am finished.”
The Lord is often hampered because He cannot show us what we are like, because we do not understand justification.
We are so self-righteous that if we really saw what we were capable of, it would be the biggest shock we had ever had. We would never be able to pray again, never be able to sing another hymn again, never be able to fellowship again. We would say, “I cannot do it. I cannot do it. Now I know what I am like.”
And we would have the strange idea that it had come as a great shock to the Lord. “No, do not tell Him, because He thinks I am a sweet little thing. I kneel beside my bed and say my prayers. I try to do my best.”
But actually, the Lord knows the worst in you, and He loves you.
The atoning death of our Lord Jesus is the most wonderful thing in the whole world. In Hebrew, the word atonement just means covering. Did you know that?
Yom Kippur: Day of Atonement, Day of Covering. Kippur: covering.
What atonement is, in that one death for all, is that Jesus covered all our sin. He took it all into Himself and bore it away. God has declared that you and I are justified.
You know the old thing they used to say, at least when I was converted: justified—just as if you had never sinned.
Listen to these wonderful words. Maybe they will come home to you with new meaning, from 2 Corinthians 5:21:
Him Who knew no sin He made to be sin on our behalf;
That we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
Listen to that carefully again. He Who knew no sin, God made to be our sin—or sin on our behalf. He made the One Who knew no sin to be our sin, that you and I might become the righteousness of God—God’s righteousness.
It is a transfer. God took your sin and put it on the Lord Jesus, and took the righteousness of the Lord Jesus and put it on you. When you are in Christ, you are covered. You are covered.
You have the garment of salvation upon you. You are actually covered so that God only sees the righteousness and holiness of the Lord Jesus.
When God looked at the Lord Jesus, He saw your sin, and He smote Him, according to the word: “I will smite the shepherd.”
What a glorious thing, then, it is when the Lord says to you and me, “Fear not, for I have redeemed thee. I paid the price. I have become your sin and paid the price of your sin. My righteousness is now yours.”
The Scripture says some marvellous things about this. I think of Isaiah again, and those wonderful words in Isaiah 44:22:
I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions,
And, as a cloud, thy sins:
Return unto Me; for I have redeemed thee.
Or again, Isaiah 43:25:
I, even I, am He that blotteth out thy transgressions for Mine own sake;
And I will not remember thy sins.
Blotted out. Remembered no more. It is as if you came to the Lord and said, “Do You remember, Lord, when I did so-and-so, when I sinned?” And the Lord would say to you, “I do not know what you are talking about.”
Atoned: covered.
It says in another place:
Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord:
Though your sins be as scarlet,
They shall be as white as snow.— Isaiah 1:18
My dear friend, it is only because the Lord has done this great work that He can form an Israel out of a Jacob. He dare not start even the work of transformation. He dare not start the work of uncovering what you are, so that you see there is no going back and no other alternative.
You can only go on; the Lord is your only hope. He cannot even do it unless you understand His redemption.
But there is another thing to His redemption. I am not at all sure that in the New Testament it is so neatly divided—the subjective work of the cross from the objective work of the cross—as some of us would like to think.
I think of these wonderful words in Galatians 2:20. They are known so well to some of you:
I have been crucified with Christ;
Yet I live; and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me:
And that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith,
The faith which is in the Son of God, Who loved me, and gave Himself up for me.
You have the two things: “I have been crucified with Christ,” and “the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
I do not know about you, but I will tell you what I think is the problem in my life. It is not just sin. Are you ready? It is I. I do not mean about me, but about yourself.
Have you come to that conclusion? The problem is me: I, I will, I will not, I shall, I will take, it is my opinion—I.
How can Jacob, the most “I” person in the Old Testament, ever become Israel, a prince with God, reigning with God? How can he become Israel unless God deals with the “I”?
God did. He wrestled with him and put his thigh out of joint.
Of course, sometimes we get the idea that God just wants to destroy the “I” altogether. When I was first converted, they used to sing a hymn, I remember, that in my very irreverent frame of mind I used to find terribly funny—to see all these grown-ups singing their hearts out, “Channels only.”
“Channels only, blessed Master, but with all Thy wondrous power flowing through us.” I used to think of some kind of little drainpipe, you know what I mean? I used to think, “What an extraordinary thing—all these people saying, ‘Channels only.’”
I think it got so far into many of them that they decided they must not be personalities at all. They were really quite colourless, a lot of them. They could hardly say boo to a goose. They had really become channels only.
I mean, the trouble was that the Lord did not come through. Now, if the Lord had come through and the channels had been flooded over with the Lord, that would have been something. But apparently their idea of being a Christian was to be a little kind of drainpipe.
“Must not be—oh, be careful—nothing more than a channel.”
I think the Lord would have a very easy time if He could only reduce us to being channels. If that was His plan and design—just pull the “I” out until we were nothing, until we were little channels, little pipes—would not it be easy?
But, you see, the Lord did not create us like that. He created us with emotions, and with a will, and with reasoning powers. It is not quite so easy.
Furthermore, when He has done the work in our spirit, He wants to reclaim our emotions, reclaim our will, and reclaim even our reasoning powers. They all come under the government of the Holy Spirit.
That is not so easy as being a channel only. I understand what the hymn writer meant now, as I have got a little older.
But some people get the idea, “I have been crucified; it is not I anymore. I am gone.” Listen very carefully: unfortunately, it is not as easy as that.
It would be so lovely if we had some kind of spiritual wand that we could wave over congregations, but unfortunately it does not work like that.
I have been crucified with Christ;
Yet I live; and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me.
Oh dear, I do wish Paul would be clearer sometimes. That really gets us into such a mess. Let us listen to it again: “I have been crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”
Now, what do you mean, Paul? Is it I or not I?
Really, what Paul is saying is this: the big “I,” with the “I” life, has been crucified with Christ; and the broken “I” still lives in Christ.
It is still an “I”—the same “I.” That is why John could say, “I, John,” and Paul could say in another place, “I, Paul.”
This work of the cross is absolutely essential if God is going to form Israel out of Jacob. If God is going to conform me to the image of His Son, His biggest problem is me.
Until I come to the place where I will say to the Lord, “Okay, Lord, when You died, I died. Do Your work,” there can be no true transformation.
Sometimes young Christians come to me and say, “Oh, I have such a problem about living the Christian life. I do not know how to live. That is my problem. Can you tell me how to live the Christian life?”
I always say to them, “Listen, your problem is not how to live. Your problem is how to die.”
If you can learn the secret of how to die daily, the living will take care of itself.
For the law of the cross is this: if you go down, you will come up. If you humble yourself, God will exalt you. If you lose your reputation, God will preserve your reputation in the end.
If you become a doormat, you will in the end sit on the throne. If you go down into the depths, God will raise you to the heights. If you want to be whole, you must know what it is to be broken. If you want to know power, you must know what it is to be weak.
That is the law, the unchanging law, of the cross.
We have this treasure in earthen vessels,
That the exceeding greatness of the power may be of God, and not from ourselves.— 2 Corinthians 4:7
Then he goes into a catalogue of things. This is in 2 Corinthians 4:
We are pressed on every side, yet not straitened;
Perplexed, yet not unto despair;
Pursued, yet not forsaken;
Smitten down, yet not destroyed;
Always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus,
That the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our body.So then death worketh in us, but life in you.
Now, my dear friend, I am so glad to hear what Dana said this morning about the charismatic movement. I fully endorse it. I believe it is one of the greatest movements of the Holy Spirit in the history of the church, with all its failings, all its extremes, and all its successes.
I have no doubt whatsoever that the Holy Spirit was in this whole thing. But I have to say this: if I were to talk about being pressed on every side, perplexed, pursued, and smitten down, most people would think I was a candidate for a deliverance ministry.
“Oh, you need to be delivered, dear brother. This is not the Christian life—pressed on every side? No, no, no, no, no. Have you heard of the prosperity gospel? You should be all overflowing.”
Perplexed? We send people to theological seminaries so they will not be perplexed. You are supposed to have the answers. Do not be perplexed. Pursued? You should not be pursued. Smitten down?
Phillips put it beautifully in his translation years ago: “Knocked down, but not knocked out.”
But that is not what Paul is saying. Listen: pressed on every side, but not straitened. There is no frustration of the purpose of God, only fulfilment.
Perplexed, yet not unto despair—always at your wits’ end, and the Lord always coming in. Pursued—an object for the enemy to pursue—but not forsaken.
Smitten down, smitten down, yet not destroyed. Always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus. Do you not see? This is a work of the cross that very few believers know much about, if anything.
The cross frees. The cross is the most liberating work in the whole world.
But when the Holy Spirit works in human life, there can be seasons in which we are conscious of death, and others are conscious of death when they touch us. You know the kind of thing.
Well, my dear friend, we have to stop here. Let me put it this way: when we talk about the exceeding greatness of His power, what are we talking about?
We are talking about the exceeding greatness of His power which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead.
It is the Person of the Holy Spirit by Whom the Lord Jesus came again from the dead—the Spirit of Him Who raised Jesus from the dead, as Romans 8 says. Is that not true?
It is the unique work of the Person of the Holy Spirit to form. It was He Who brooded upon the formless, chaotic waters and wastes of the world in the beginning.
When the Word of God was spoken, it was the blessed Person of the Holy Spirit Who brought order out of disorder and form into formlessness. It has always been the same.
It was the Holy Spirit Who brought to birth the Lord Jesus. It was the Holy Spirit Who formed a body of one hundred and twenty members out of one hundred and twenty units of a congregation. Always the work of the Holy Spirit.
But the Holy Spirit never works apart from the redeeming work of the Lord Jesus.
How did you get saved? You thought you just signed a decision, or put your hand up, or went forward, or something happened like that. You prayed with somebody.
But in actual fact, it was the Holy Spirit Who opened your eyes. There you were, first made alive to God, and your eyes opened like a newborn babe to a new world. Suddenly you realised that the Bible meant something to you, when it had never meant anything to you before in your whole life.
Who opened your eyes? The Holy Spirit.
You took your first steps in the Christian life. Who empowered you, though you hardly knew it? Who empowered you? The Holy Spirit.
Did you ever weep tears of repentance? Who convicted you? The Holy Spirit.
Every time you have seen something more in the work of the Lord Jesus, something more in the Word of God, Who opened your eyes? The Holy Spirit—blessed, gentle, powerful Holy Spirit.
He never works apart from the Lord Jesus, always unveiling the Lord Jesus, always pointing to the Lord Jesus.
My dear friends, never be afraid about genuine baptism—immersed in the power of the Holy Spirit. Marvellous, marvellous.
That is what happened to Jacob when he said, “This place I shall call Peniel, for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.”
Anyone who has had a real experience of the Holy Spirit will know what I am talking about. You have to call it the face of God: “I saw the Lord in some new way, in some deep way, in some fuller measure. I saw the Lord.”
Oh, dear friend, I think that is enough. But tonight, is it not a marvellous thing that the Lord loves you and loves me so much?
Is it not wonderful that He comes to you and to me and says:
But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob,
And He that formed thee, O Israel: Fear not, for I have redeemed thee.
The Lord has a purpose for you. He wants you to be a builder, not a destroyer; a planter, not a supplanter; a blesser and a blessing, not a twister; a worshipper, not a deceiver.
That is the purpose of the Lord for you, and it is the purpose of the Lord for me. It is to make us princes with God—people who can reign with Him. That is His purpose, friend.
It is just marvellous to know the determination of divine love in this matter. May God bring you to a new discovery of Himself, and above all to an opening up of your own heart to the blessed Person and work of the Holy Spirit.
He can lead you in His own inimitable way to your Jabbok, and to a seeing of the Lord that will make all the cost worthwhile.
Shall we pray?
Lord, You know our hearts. You know all of us, Lord. We want to be what You want us to be. We do not want to be, Lord, anything else.
We also, most of us, know, Lord, that only what You do in us is worthwhile. We are living in a world that is topsy-turvy, and increasingly so.
Lord, whilst we have time, we pray, grant, Lord, that we may know Your wonderful work in our hearts and lives. Lord, in some way cast Your Spirit on us, so that, Lord, we are brought to that place where You can do that work in us.
May that work be the conforming of us to the image of Your Son—not in one go, but progressively.
We ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.