Please turn to 1 Chronicles 29, beginning with verse 10.
And David blessed the Lord before all the assembly; and David said, Blessed be Thou, O Lord, the God of Israel our father, for ever and ever.
Thine, O Lord, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty: for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is Thine; Thine is the kingdom, O Lord, and Thou art exalted as head above all.
Both riches and honor come of Thee, and Thou rulest over all; and in Thy hand is power and might; and in Thy hand it is to make great, and to give strength unto all.
Now therefore, our God, we thank Thee, and praise Thy glorious name.—1 Chronicles 29:10-13
Please turn also to Psalm 89:14.
Righteousness and justice are the foundation of Thy throne:
Lovingkindness and truth go before Thy face.—Psalm 89:14
Finally, turn to Job 42:5-6.
I had heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear;
But now mine eye seeth Thee:
Wherefore I abhor myself,
And repent in dust and ashes.—Job 42:5-6
Let us have a word of prayer.
Dear Lord, as we gather here this morning, we bow in worship, knowing that Thou art on the throne and that Thou art in charge of everything. Even the hairs of our heads are numbered. There is not a sparrow that falls without Thy knowledge.
We thank Thee for Thy tremendous love toward us. We thank Thee for Thy only begotten Son. We thank Thee for all the sufficient supply that Thou hast provided for us. In spite of all our weaknesses, we thank Thee that Thou art sufficient, and that Thy power is manifested in our weakness, that Thy will may be done in every one of us. Amen.
Brothers and sisters, we are living in the most exciting time. Why is it so? Because we are living on the verge of a great change. We know that this age is coming to an end, and the age of the kingdom is coming in.
I really feel that we are at that juncture. That is the reason why we find living in this world is getting more and more difficult. What the young people are facing today, when we were young, we never encountered. It is because of the time.
As we are living at this juncture, how can we be faithful to the Lord? If it depends upon ourselves, we will not be able to overcome. But thank God, one thing never changes: God’s throne is set in heaven. He is in charge of everything.
So it is time for us to look away from ourselves, to look away from everything around us, and look up to God on the throne. This is the secret of Christian living.
May the Lord, as we gather here, open our eyes to see one thing: that God sits upon His throne. He is in control, and He knows everything about us. He is there to train us, to discipline us, and to enable us to grow in stature, that we may be fit for our Lord Jesus Christ.
Brothers and sisters, I always feel this is the most exciting time. It is the most important time, as well as the most dangerous time. This morning, we would like to see what is meant by God being on the throne.
We know that when David was preparing for the temple of God, he was not allowed to build it because he had shed too much blood. But God would allow his son to build the temple.
Because of his love for the Lord, in spite of the fact that he was not allowed to build it, God did give him the pattern of the temple. Because David loved the Lord very much, we find that in his affliction he gathered many materials for the building of the house.
David prepared many things for the building of the house. He showed Solomon the pattern of the temple, and he encouraged everybody to offer freely for the temple. The people offered freely, and because of this David was filled with thanksgiving. He blessed the Lord.
So, in 1 Chronicles 29, we find David saying:
Blessed be Thou, O Lord, the God of Israel our father, for ever and ever.
Thine, O Lord, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty.
For all that is in the heavens and in the earth is Thine.
Thine is the kingdom, O Lord, and Thou art exalted as head above all.
Both riches and honor come of Thee, and Thou rulest over all; and in Thy hand is power and might; and in Thy hand it is to make great, and to give strength unto all.
Now therefore, our God, we thank Thee, and praise Thy glorious name.
We know that God is on the throne. He has the power, He has the authority, and He has the rule. He has the power and might to make all great and strong. This is what God on the throne means.
Brothers and sisters, after God created the heavens and the earth, we know that the highest creation was the angel. At that time there was no man yet. God created the angels, and among the angels God created one full of beauty and glory.
We find in Ezekiel 28 that this angel was a brilliant star with many gifts. He was an anointed cherub before the throne of God, and he was the one who led the angels in worship and praise.
In other words, God delegated much authority to that archangel. In the beginning, when he was created, he was perfect before God. But gradually, because of his power and his gifts, he began to turn to himself. He wanted to be equal with God. He wanted to take the place that belongs to God only.
Because of this, we find that God discharged him. God may delegate His authority to others, but He never gives up His authority. He is the One who is on the throne.
It would have been very easy for God to destroy Lucifer, Satan, just by a breath. But that would bring no glory to God. It is like a big man striking a little child.
So God had His own plan. He wanted someone lower than an angel to be used by Him to defeat the angel who was higher than man. That is the reason why we are here.
When you turn to Genesis, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. But the earth became waste and void. In other words, there was a catastrophe on this earth before, because of the rebellion of Lucifer. Evidently, at that time, the earth was given to Satan to rule for God.
When he rebelled against God, whatever was under him came under judgment. The earth was covered with water. But thank God, God never fails. Whatever He has determined in His heart, He always accomplishes.
We do not know how long that situation continued. But thank God, in His love, we find the Spirit of God brooding over the face of the waters. In six days, He restored the earth to be habitable, and on the sixth day He created man.
Brothers and sisters, man was created in a very special way. God had never done anything like this before. He created the heavens and the earth and all the things in them, but He never created anything in His own image and according to His likeness.
But when He began to create man, He said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness.” That was how man was created. In other words, we are created in such a way that we are able to receive God Himself into us.
Because we have the same image, which speaks of inner character, we are able to receive God Himself into us. By that, God can use us to defeat His enemy. Man was created with a mission: to be used by God to destroy His enemy and to bring all things under the feet of His beloved Son.
We all know the story of how God put man in the Garden of Eden. God created all the trees for the food of man because our body needs food. He made every provision for our body.
But we also know that in the midst of the garden, God planted the tree of life. That tree means a tree that can give us life. It is the life of God. It indicates that God wants us to receive His life, and only with that life are we able to accomplish what God has ordained for us.
By the side of the tree of life, God planted another tree, called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Sometimes we feel that this is a very bad tree. How could God plant that tree in the Garden of Eden?
As a matter of fact, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a better tree, but it is not the best tree. The best tree is the tree of life. The second-best tree is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
God made provision for man. He provided for man’s body by giving all the fruits of the different trees. He made provision for the soul, that we might have the knowledge of good and evil. And He made provision for our spirit by giving us the tree of life, that His own life might become the life of our spirit.
But God warned man, “Of every tree in the garden thou mayest freely eat.” Of course, that included the tree of life. How anxious God was to see man choose the tree of life!
But concerning the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God said:
Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it:
For in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.—Genesis 2:17
Why is this so? There is no knowledge in the world higher than the knowledge of good and evil. Scientific knowledge cannot be compared with moral knowledge. Ethics is the highest knowledge the world has ever known.
But the problem is this: if you have the knowledge and do not have the life, you know what is good and what is evil, but you do not have the power to do the good and resist the evil. What will be the result? Of course, it is death.
What our God wants man to do is to take the tree of life, to be united with God, and to depend upon His life, that we may live according to His will. But unfortunately, man was deceived.
When God put Adam in the Garden of Eden, He gave him a commission. The garden had no wall around it, and Satan was outside the garden. He tried to get in in order to tempt man. So God gave man the commission to guard the garden, that the enemy would not be able to enter in and destroy.
But unfortunately, man failed to guard the garden. Satan slipped in and persuaded Eve to take the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Satan tempted man by saying, “You can be independent. You do not need to depend upon God. If you eat this fruit of the forbidden tree, God is jealous of you. He does not want you to take it. He does not want you to be equal with God.”
“If you eat this fruit, you will know as God knows. You do not need God anymore. You can be God yourself.” What a temptation that was! We find how man failed under the temptation.
The Bible says that on the day man ate the forbidden fruit, he would surely die. Of course, physically speaking, Adam lived on for hundreds of years. Their body was living, and their soul was living. But what was dead at that time? It was the spirit.
Brothers and sisters, so far as human beings are concerned, we seem to forget that we have a spirit. We think that we have only soul and body.
I remember when I was young, we had in our family a foreign grandmother. She was a missionary to China, and she was the one who led my father to the Lord. After she retired, she did not want to go back to the States, so she lived with us. We called her Grandma.
Whenever she was exasperated, she would always say, “Oh, my soul and body!” She had no thought of the spirit. That is the situation with the world today. People in the world have only body and soul, and the highest living is trying to live by ethics.
It does not mean that there is no spirit as an organ. It simply means that man has lost the proper function of his spirit.
Scientifically speaking, what is death? Death is the cessation of relationship with one’s proper environment. For instance, when our body dies, it has lost contact with its proper environment. It cannot see anymore; it cannot touch anymore. It has lost contact with its proper environment. That is the death of the body.
What is the death of the spirit? It does not mean the spirit no longer exists. The spirit is still there, but it has lost its proper environment. It cannot make contact with God.
Before we were saved, we might even pray, but our spirit could not contact God. Man still has a spirit, but that spirit has lost its proper function. It has only an improper function, because it can still contact evil spirits. That shows the spirit is still there, but it has lost its proper function.
That is the situation of man today. But God did not give up. When God has made a purpose, no matter what happens, He will eventually accomplish what He has purposed.
Thank God, we all know the gospel. The gospel is that God sent His only begotten Son into this world to be made a man, just as we are. Through that Man, Jesus, God was able to accomplish all that He had ordained from the beginning. Through that Man, God was able to bring many sons into glory.
Brothers and sisters, one thing we are sure of: God may delegate authority, but He never gives up His authority. He is in charge of all things.
We who belong to the Lord know that He takes care of us. There is nothing that can happen to us without His permission.
Whatever happens to us is not always the direct will of God; it may be His permissive will. Sometimes He leads us directly by His own will. He shows us what His will is and leads us in that way.
But at other times, He may lead us by His permissive will. The reason is that there is something within us that we need to learn. There is something within us that is not totally in agreement with Him.
Whatever may not be God’s direct will for us, if it is His permission, we find that behind it there is God on the throne. Whenever He allows any permissive will to come into our life, it is not something God directly wants to do to us. But He knows there is something in us that we need to learn.
So He permits the enemy, and He permits our environment, to come to us in such a way that we may learn what needs to be learned, and that He may remove whatever needs to be removed in our life.
One thing is sure: He will never permit anything to happen to us beyond our ability. He will impart Himself to us in such a degree that, when His permissive will comes into our life, we have the inner strength to overcome it.
It is because we do not depend upon Him and try to face our situation by ourselves that we fail. The Bible tells us that God may test us, but He will never tempt us. Temptation comes from the enemy; sometimes temptation comes from our own lust.
God only tests us, but He never tempts us. When He tests us, He has already deposited Himself in us to such a degree that He knows we are able to overcome. That is what happens in our life.
Brothers and sisters, while we are living in this last age, what is the secret of living? The secret of living is seeing God on the throne.
Whenever our eyes turn to ourselves, we fail. But whenever we set our eyes upon God on the throne, if we can see His throne there, we will overcome. That is the secret we find in the Word of God.
This morning, I would like to use an extreme case to illustrate how this works. We know that in the Bible there is the book of Job. As a matter of fact, chronologically speaking, this is the first book in the Bible. It was written before the five books of Moses.
Here we find a man. The Bible says there was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. Job was not a Jew. Yet this man Job was a son of Esau, because, when you turn to Lamentations 4:21, you find that the sons of Esau lived in the land of Uz.
This man was a descendant of Esau. It shows that God has no partiality. The reason God loved Jacob and hated Esau was not because He was partial, but because He knew exactly what Esau and Jacob were.
I believe when we read the Bible, probably you will agree with me that Esau was a better man. He was straightforward, but Jacob was tricky. Yet God loved Jacob. Why? Because Jacob had a heart for God. He had a heart for God’s blessing.
Thank God, God is not partial in any way. I remember, even when I was young, that foreign grandmother loved my youngest brother. My father had seven children, but she seemed to love my youngest brother more. So we tried to stir her up, saying, “You are partial.”
She was so exasperated. She said, “I love you all just the same. But why does it seem that I love your brother more? Because he is closer to me.”
Brothers and sisters, that is the spirit of our God. He loves us all. Sometimes we may feel that He loves another more than us, but it is not because He is partial.
Here we find a man who belonged to Esau, yet he was a man perfect and upright, one that feared God and turned away from evil. That is quite a description.
Of course, this was not absolute perfection. But compared with other people, he was really perfect. He feared God and abstained from all evil. He was an upright person. Because of this, God blessed him, and his name became very great.
In spite of his greatness, he was still pious before God. He had seven sons and three daughters, and they had a very harmonious family. When the sons had their festivals, they always invited their sisters to be with them.
Job was such a pious person that he was afraid when his ten children had a good time. Every time after they finished their festival, Job would offer sacrifices for them.
I think, brothers and sisters, even today it is very hard to find a righteous person like that. But Satan was also watching.
One day, when God was on His throne, all the angels came before Him. Even Satan, as an angel, was there. God did something most unusual: God challenged Satan with Job.
Brothers and sisters, I am not qualified even to be a challenge of God before Satan. But Job feared God in such a way, and he was such a perfect person, that God was able to challenge Satan about him.
God said, “Satan, where have you been?” Brothers and sisters, do not think Satan is idle. He is very, very busy. He goes here and there, up and down, watching for opportunity to attack God’s people in order to attack God.
He cannot touch God directly, so all he can do is touch God’s people and try to use that against God. Then God said, “Have you considered My servant Job?”
Satan said, in effect, “Does Job fear God for nothing? You have blessed him. If You take away his blessings, Job will curse You to Your face.”
Brothers and sisters, how God’s people today live for blessing. Oh, we love blessing. Sometimes you find a book called The Promises of God. You do not need to bother to search the Scriptures; you just open the book, and it tells you what promises God has given to us. Many people read one promise a day. That is what we like.
That is the difference between those who really love the Lord and those who love only the blessings. Satan knows about this. He said, “If You take away his blessings, Job will curse You to Your face.”
But by God’s permissive will, He knew what He had done in the life of Job. There was enough reserve in him to stand that accusation. God allowed Satan to tempt Job.
Why? Because God also knew there was something in Job that was not pure, that was not wholly for God. Job had a fear within him. He always feared that one day God would punish him and take away his blessings. His understanding of God was not complete.
God wanted to use that opportunity. God even made use of His enemy to fulfill what He wanted to complete in Job’s life.
So, brothers and sisters, whatever may happen to you, remember this: God is on the throne. Satan can do nothing to you without the permission of God.
If God should permit something to come, there is a purpose behind it. On the one hand, He knows He has deposited enough of Himself in you, and you will be able to overcome it. On the other hand, He wants to bring out that which is yet incomplete. He wants to deliver you and mature you.
So God said, “All right, go ahead and do it.” Satan had no mercy. In one day, he took away everything from Job, even his children. Yet Job bowed his head and worshiped.
Thank God, Satan had not finished yet. One day Satan and the angels again appeared before God. God said, “Have you considered My servant Job? All that you have done, yet he did not depart from Me.”
Satan said, “If You touch his life, You may take everything outside of him and he will still love You. But touch his life, and then he will curse You.” Satan always tries to do his work to the extreme degree.
But God knew. He knew that there was enough of Himself in Job. So Satan touched Job’s body, and he had boils all over him. His wife said, “Curse God, and die.”
Thank God, Job still held fast. Then we find in the book of Job that his three friends came to visit him. They were people who feared God. When they saw what had happened to Job, they really felt for him. They sat with him seven days and seven nights without saying a word.
Then the Bible tells us what happened. Satan’s attack seemed to fail, because Satan disappeared. But the sympathy of Job’s friends broke down, and there began a conversation between Job and his three friends.
This is what happened in the soul of Job. When Job was going through all these trials, what was the voice within him? The voice of his soul was expressed by his three friends.
In our soul, we have three parts: we have feeling, we have mind, and we have will. I feel these three friends represent the voice of our soul.
Sometimes we think that the bad side of our flesh needs to be denied and resisted, but the good side of our soul needs to be kept. Yet the Bible says, “There is nothing good in me, that is, in my flesh.” Even the best of the soul does not know the mind of God.
These three friends represent the best of Job: how he really felt, how he really thought, and how he really saw in his soul.
The first friend, Eliphaz, represents the best of the soul’s feeling. He was very mystical. Our feeling is really mystical. Out of that mystical feeling, he said that it must be that Job had sinned. Otherwise, how could he suffer in such a way?
Then the second friend, Bildad, represents the mind of the soul. In his speech, he referred to tradition. According to the wisdom of the ages, God would only punish the evil and be good to the good.
Then the third person, Zophar, represents the will. Zophar was very dogmatic. He said, “You must have sinned; otherwise it would not happen that way.”
So we find the voice of the soul telling Job that he must have sinned. Yet Job felt within himself that he had not sinned. He did not know really what to do.
Finally, we find Elihu. He represents the spirit of man. The spirit of man began to see light. He began to see the discipline of the Lord. Then finally God Himself appeared to Job.
The strangest thing is that when Job was in that situation, all he asked of God was that God would give him an explanation. He simply could not understand what had happened. On the one hand, he was trusting God; on the other hand, he did not know why this had happened to him.
Because of this, he murmured. He misunderstood God. He thought God was being hard on him, and he cried for God to explain.
Finally, God Himself appeared to him. But you will find it very strange: God did not explain to him why. On the contrary, God only demonstrated His authority and His power.
God is God. He knows what He is doing. He can do anything He wants. He is for the good of His own. In other words, God appeared to Job to show him that God is on the throne.
If we look at our environment, if we look at ourselves, we do not know why such things happen. But if we get a vision of God on the throne, then we know He is in charge. He knows exactly what He is doing.
Even if it is His permissive will, His thought is good. He wants to purify us and deliver us even from our own thinking, that we may completely yield to Him and enable Him to take away anything in us that comes from ourselves—our own righteousness and our own success.
He wants us to really acknowledge that we are nothing. Brothers and sisters, when Job was shown God on the throne, the authority of God, and that whatever He does He has the right to do, Job understood that God was doing it for his good.
Then Job abhorred himself. He said, “In the past I had heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear; but now mine eye seeth Thee. Therefore I repent in dust and ashes.”
Then we find God turning the captivity of Job, and afterward God gave him double. That is God’s thought concerning us.
Brothers and sisters, we who are passing through various trials, who are passing through all these temptations, often wonder, “Why? Why?” Let us lift up our eyes and see God. He cannot be wrong.
He has a reason for whatever happens in our life, and there is a lesson He wants to teach. There is still much in us that needs to be dealt with, and it is so that we will grow into maturity.
I think it is very clear from the Scriptures that, as we walk in this life, we need to see God on the throne. The earlier we yield ourselves, the better. Do not resist the discipline that is coming.
Let us pray.
Dear Lord, Thy ways are higher than our ways. We yield ourselves to Thee, knowing that Thou art on the throne and that Thou art supporting and supplying us, that we may look up unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith.
We give ourselves to Thee. Lead us according to Thy purpose and fulfill Thy will in us. We give Thee all the glory. In the precious name of the Lord Jesus. Amen.