[Opening words indistinct.]
Egocentric, so bound up with their own needs that they expect the whole church, the kingdom of God, and God Himself to circle around them. They cannot get free from that bondage to self.
And when we are like that, even if we are theological, even though we have lots of big ideas about the Bible and about God and everything else, the fact remains that we are not a blessing; we steal blessings. We do not give; we acquire. We are all the time taking, taking, taking, taking, taking. We do not give.
The purpose of God for Jacob was that he should be a blessing. In the end, this man who was not a blessing naturally, who was not a giver naturally—he was an acquirer naturally; he stole the blessing naturally—became a blessing. In the end, he blessed Pharaoh in some of the most beautiful words in Scripture, blessed his sons in amazingly prophetic words, and blessed those two sons of Joseph so significantly that it is mentioned in the New Testament in the summing up of Jacob’s life.
A blessing.
Then we spoke fourthly of another purpose of God for Jacob: that he might have power with God and with men; that he might become a prince with God and with men. That is exactly what Jacob finally became by the persevering grace of God.
God never ceased loving him, never forsook him, never deserted him, even though He hid Himself at times from Jacob. He loved him out of Jacob into Israel: out of being a man at the mercy of his own nature, at the mercy of relationships, circumstances, and problems, into a man who had power with God and therefore with men.
And that is what God wants to do for you and for me. He wants to bring us, in a word, to the throne. He wants to bring us to the place where we reign with Christ. He wants to bring us to the place where we sit together with Christ in heavenly places.
Now, this evening I want to take the fifth of these matters to do with the purpose of God for Jacob, and it is very important indeed. It is to do with the house of God.
The purpose of God for Jacob, fifthly, was that he might build, or produce, the house of God. Now, in Jacob’s life we find this symbolically all wrapped up with the name Bethel. Bethel, in Hebrew, means “house of God”: beth-el, house of God.
It is very interesting that Jacob’s life is completely circumscribed by Bethel. First, he comes to Bethel, and there God meets with him in an initial way. Then God takes him a long way round for twenty years or more.
In those twenty years Jacob comes face to face with himself and becomes sick of himself. He was unaware of himself to begin with. Indeed, when God appeared to him the first time at this place he called Bethel, the house of God, Jacob bargained with the Lord and said, “Lord, You said You were going to leave me very well. You do it, You do it. And if You do, and You bring me back to my father’s house in peace, and You feed me and clothe me, You shall be my God.”
Oh, good old Jacob! “You shall be my God”—so magnanimous. I am sure the Lord must have thought, “Oh, Jacob, You shall be my God, and I will build You a house. And of all that You give me, I will give a tenth to You.”
That was good business acumen: nine-tenths his, one-tenth the Lord’s.
Later on, God appeared to him. It is interesting how God called Himself. He did not say this time, “I am the God of Abraham and of Isaac.” He said to him, “Jacob, I am the God of Bethel”—the God of the house of God, where I revealed Myself. Do you remember? And where you anointed a pillar and called upon My name.
Then, a little later on, when he was coming right back into the land, now within the promised land at Shechem, God appeared to him and said, “Go. I am the God who revealed Myself to you at Bethel.” He went, and he called the name of the pillar he set up at Bethel, El-bethel: God of the house of God.
Now, I do not know whether this means anything to you. I can well imagine that many people wonder, “What has all this got to do with us? What exactly does it mean? What significance has it got for us?”
It is true that God calls all His redeemed people Jacob. He calls all His redeemed people Israel. What has this got to do with us? It has a tremendous amount to do with us.
Jacob said some very interesting things about this house of God. First, when the Lord revealed this fact to him and he received a revelation concerning the purpose of God, he said, “How dreadful is this place!” Secondly, he said, “This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”
I wish that New Testament believers had as much understanding of the purpose of God regarding the house of God as some of these Old Testament patriarchs.
Sometimes we think of them as ignorant, wandering, smelly Bedouin shepherds, hardly understanding, all wrapped up with shadows and types and figures. I reckon that if Abraham could come back, he would probably give us a splendid conference. And I have a deep suspicion that Jacob could do a good deal better than I can in talking about him.
These men saw something. Would to God that we, with all the advantages and privileges under the new covenant—with the indwelling as well as the empowering of the Holy Spirit given to us under the new covenant, and the law written on our hearts—understood what these patriarchs understood.
But it seems as if the enemy has done his most damning work in blinding the people of God to some of the most fundamental issues concerning the purpose of God for His own. If he cannot stop us from being saved, he will stop us from entering and possessing the land, from multiplying. If he cannot stop us there, then he will certainly blind us to what is the real objective of it all.
There is a tremendous amount in the Bible about the house of God. If you want a theme, a Bible study to take up, take the words “temple of God,” “tabernacle of God,” and “house of God,” and trace them through Scripture. You will be amazed.
You will find, right through Scripture—from Exodus onwards, though actually it begins in Genesis—that right the way through to the book of Revelation you have a theme running through all sixty-six books of the Bible: the house of God, the tabernacle of God, the temple of God.
So tremendous is this matter that, in the Old Testament—and now I will bore you for a few minutes; you can go to sleep. I always say about the Lord’s people, especially the dear evangelicals, that they have managed to produce some marvelous method whereby they can sleep with their eyes open.
Well, never mind. If you feel like having a little sleep, do not worry. Even if your eyes shut, it will not stop me. I shall just go on to the end, even if only the angels are listening.
When we take this matter of the Bible, we find a tremendously interesting thing. Let me give you a little Bible lesson for a moment. When we have got so far in the Bible, we come to the book of Deuteronomy.
Now, the interesting thing is that Deuteronomy goes right back over the previous four books all over again, as if God is saying, “Now, just wait. Before we go on, we must go back. We will sum everything up, and here is the heart of the matter.”
God has set His love on you. That was a new thing. You do not find that so much in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, or Numbers, but it explains everything. Why did God not give them up? Why did God not forsake them? Why did God not desert them? God did not do so because He loved them.
Why does He love you? He set His love on you and chose you because He loves you.
Then, the second thing:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy strength, with all thy mind, with all thy soul.
So here we find something: God is looking for a love relationship. He is looking for something that exists between husband and wife, between bridegroom and bride—something so intimate, so direct, an opening up of two human beings to one another, with no bars, nothing held back.
So now we begin to understand God as it were saying, “Come back, come back, come back to Genesis. Why did I create you? Why did I create a universe? Why did I create mankind? Why did I persevere with you when you fell? Why did I take Noah and seven others with him when I destroyed the whole world? Why did I select Shem? Why later did I take Abraham out of all the inhabitants of the earth, and then Isaac, and then Jacob? Why?”
Because I love you. That is why. And because you must love Me. We want this marvelous relationship with one another, this wonderful relationship of love. That is the first thing.
But the second thing about Deuteronomy is that something else comes in which has hardly been mentioned before:
Ye shall not offer your sacrifices or your offerings on any hill or place that ye shall choose.
But ye shall offer them in the place where I shall cause My name to dwell.
This comes again and again and again in the book of Deuteronomy, as if the Lord is saying, “Do not think you can go anywhere—that it just does not matter where you go. There is going to be one place that I select, and in that place there will be a city, and in that city there will be a temple, and there you shall come.”
Now go back again. We go all the way from Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth—and then what happens? We come to what in Hebrew are four books. They are called the four books of the kingdom: 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 2 Kings.
These four books trace the whole history of the people of God. They go right back to the beginning and say, “Here is the reason why God saved the people, why He took them into Egypt, why He made them a nation in Egypt, why He brought them out of Egypt.” Do you know what the purpose is? It is that His throne might be among them. It is that His kingdom might be among them.
You have the kingdom of David, the house of David. It is a most wonderful thing. Even the Messiah is great David’s greater Son.
The prophet Isaiah says, in Isaiah 9:
Of the increase of His government and of peace there shall be no end,
upon the throne of David, and upon His kingdom,
to establish it, and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness
from henceforth even for ever.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.
This matter of the kingdom becomes one of the great major themes of the Bible. This matter of the King, the Man after God’s own heart, becomes one of the great themes of the Bible. This, as we say in Jewish circles, the King Messiah, becomes the great theme of Scripture.
It is as if God says, “Now we go all the way back to the beginning again.” We have gone all the way through from Deuteronomy, through Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, right up to this matter of the kingdom. What do you find? First, Ruth is the little threshold. She is the great-grandmother of King David.
Then, when we come into Samuel, the first thing we find is Samuel, who is the kingmaker. First we get the wrong king—the man whom men would like—and then we have God’s King, David. Then we go all the way through history, right away to the fall, the sending away into Babylon, and the return.
Marvelous, is it not? Then suddenly, as if we have got it all clear, we all think, “We have got it clear. Praise God, we have got it clear.”
First, God loves us. Secondly, we must love the Lord. Thirdly, there is going to be a city of God, which will be called the city of David. There will be the throne of God—the throne of David, of the Messiah.
Now we have come to 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 2 Kings. We understand it clearly. The whole matter is one of reigning; the whole matter is of coming to the throne. God wants us to have dominion. Did we not understand that? Did God not say right at the very beginning, “Be fruitful and multiply; have dominion”? Did He not?
Yes, now we understand the Bible. Now we understand the purpose of God. We have got it, we have got it.
Then we are so confused, because when we come to the end of 2 Kings, we come to 1 Chronicles. Some people find Chronicles chronic. They cannot get over it. “Oh,” they say, “Chronicles!”
When they read the first chapters of the first book of Chronicles, they get completely submerged in great lists of names that go right the way back to Adam. Especially if you are reading through the Bible chapter by chapter, you plod through for about nine days: one chapter after another, names, unpronounceable names, pedigrees, genealogies.
“What is it, Lord? I do believe the book is inspired. I know it is authoritative, but was it really necessary? Could we not have had a chapter or two upon what we are going to do in the kingdom to come—whether we are going to recognize each other, whether we shall eat, whether we shall drink tea or coffee?”
Could we not have those kinds of little questions instead of all these chapters of endless lists of names, going right back to what You have already once or twice before gone over—once in Deuteronomy, and once in 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 2 Kings?
Do you know what happened? We go over the whole story of the people of God right from the beginning, right the way through, and then we cover exactly the same ground as 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 2 Kings.
Of course, most of us have been brought up to revere the Word of God. We would not be so irreverent as to say, “Goodness, the Lord is long-winded. Why do we have to have all this over again?”
Whenever God says something a second time, we must note it deeply. It is always of tremendous significance when God says something again.
Why does He go over it? This time He traces the whole people of God as if He is saying, “Now listen, listen. You have only got half the truth. You have only got one side of the picture. Now you must have the other.”
The purpose of God is not merely that you come into a kingdom, that you come to the throne, that you reign with God. That is only part of the story. The other half is this: at the heart of human history lies the craving of the divine heart for a habitation, for a home, for a dwelling place.
That is why He created mankind. That is why He persevered when they fell. That is why He chose Shem. That is why He chose Abraham. That is why He took Jacob and those seventy souls into Egypt, and there made them into a nation, and took them out of the house of bondage in spite of Pharaoh.
That is why He persevered with them in the wilderness, even though, through disbelief and disobedience, a whole generation except for two—Joshua and Caleb—died in the wilderness. That is why He took them over into the land. That is why there is a kingdom. That is why there is a throne. The house of God is the heart of the whole matter.
Through 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, you have the whole story of the people of God right up to the coming of the Messiah—to the threshold of the Messiah. It is a whole story of tremendous conflict. Over what? Over the house of God: over its service, its worship, its building and rebuilding, and its recovery when lost.
This is one of the major themes of Scripture. That is why, when you come to the New Testament, you find it everywhere under different figures.
You find it under the house of God. You find it under the temple of God. You find it under the bride of Christ, the wife of the Lamb. You find it under the household of God. You find it under the body and Head. You find it under the vine of God. Jesus said, “I am the vine; ye are the branches.”
It is everywhere, everywhere. It is the city of God, the New Jerusalem, the Zion of God, to which we who are believers have come by grace. It is that Jerusalem which is above, which is the mother of us all, if we are born of God.
Here is the heart of the whole matter. Now, if you have not begun to see this matter, is it too much to ask that you would seek the Lord? Ask that God would come to you in the Spirit of grace and revelation, in the knowledge of Him, that the eyes of your heart being enlightened, you might know what is the hope of His calling.
Do you know why God has called you? Do you know what the hope of your calling is? Are you going to realize it? Are you going to allow God to do such a work in your life that, like Jacob, in the end you will be in the city?
Or are you going to throw the whole thing away through indifferent ignorance? “Ah, I do not want to hear about all that. Too heavy for me.” Or sometimes it is unbelief. We just cannot believe. Sometimes it is sin. There is some sin in your life, some compromise somewhere, and you cannot go forward with God.
Now, coming back to Jacob. In this marvelous story we have in Genesis 28, you can hardly believe it, but here we have the whole matter in this dream, this revelation that came to Jacob.
Do not despise this dream. It says about the new covenant that we shall dream dreams and some shall see visions. I do not know why, but it seems common among the people of God to despise dreams and visions, as if it is all soulish and psychic.
There is a soulish and psychic type of dreaming and vision, but there is that which characterizes the age in which we are found. So do not despise dreams. God sometimes speaks very clearly through dreams, and here was a dream through which God spoke tremendously to Jacob.
This is the first place in the whole Bible where the term “house of God” is actually mentioned. Whenever in the Bible a term is used for the first time, that is very important to our understanding of the whole thing. It is the source. Genesis is a book of beginnings. Everything begins there.
So here we have the beginning of this whole matter of the house of God. Up to now God does not reveal anything about it. From this point onwards, it will be revealed more and more clearly. First, we have it in the tabernacle; later, in the building of the temple. Then we see in Chronicles how the whole history of God’s people is understood, as far as God is concerned, in the light of how they reacted to His temple.
Then we have Ezra and Nehemiah, and the rebuilding of that house of the Lord when it had collapsed, when it had been destroyed.
Could we look for a moment or two at this matter as we find it here in Genesis 28? May I treat you like a Sunday school class and tell you exactly what Jacob saw?
He had a dream. He had a traumatic experience. He had not only swindled his brother out of the birthright; he had also stolen the blessing from him through deceit. Now, Jacob did love his father, and in many ways he could not help himself. It was that nature of his, that self-will of his. He could not help it.
He had gone through a traumatic experience when Esau threatened to kill him, and his mother said, “You have got to get out of this house and out of this country as fast as you can. You are to go to my brother, your uncle Laban, in Syria.”
And so Jacob went. He did a day’s journey and fell into absolute melancholic despair. He must have felt so alone, so forsaken. He took a stone, one of the many stones in that area—he must have found one that was at least a little more reasonable—and used it as a cushion. Then he slept: the sleep of someone who has gone through terrible sadness.
In that deep sleep God came to him. God later spoke of this as revealing Himself. So do not despise that dream. God said, “Remember? I revealed Myself to you.”
In that dream, this is what he saw. First, he saw a great ladder set up on earth, its top reaching heaven. Then he saw angels ascending and descending. Will you note that? Many people subconsciously think that they were descending and ascending. Please note that they were ascending and descending. That is very important.
So, have you got it? First, a ladder set up on earth, its top reaching heaven; angels of God ascending and descending; and then the Lord stood.
Now we have a problem with the Hebrew. It could mean “over against him,” and you could quite rightly translate it like that; or “above it,” that is, the ladder; “over it”; “toward it.” The word in Hebrew can mean “toward” or “upon.” It is very hard to know.
But let us get it quite clear: first, the ladder set up on earth, its top reaching heaven; angels of God ascending and descending; and the Lord intimately involved with both the ladder and Jacob. If you want to, you can translate it, “The Lord standing above Jacob, toward Jacob,” or you can say, “toward the ladder.”
Now, what does all this mean? Well, here is the next thing. I hope this is simple enough. It must have something to do with God. It must have something to do with the throne of God, must it not? It must have something to do with the will of God being done, must it not?
Angels of God—the word in Hebrew is again the word for messenger. They are taking messages. Very simple.
So it has something to do with the mind of God, something to do with the will of God, something to do with the throne of God, something to do with the authority of God, something to do with the work of God.
There is a connection between earth and heaven, a connection severed by sin. Even the cherubim guarded the way to the tree of life. There was no way through, a gulf between God and man.
Here in this dream Jacob sees heaven and earth united. He sees that, in connection with the Lord, angels of God are ascending and descending, bringing men into union with heaven and heaven into union with man. Something is happening.
Dear Jacob understood it, even if Christians do not. As soon as he woke up, he said, “Oh, how dreadful is this place! This is the house of God. This is the gate of heaven.”
You must understand that in Scripture gates always speak of counsel, judgment, arbitration, and the settling of a matter. The elders always sit in the gates, you remember, all the way through the Old Testament. They sit in the gates for judgment.
Anyone with a squabble goes to the elders sitting in the gates. Anyone who wants something cleared up and defined goes to the elders in the gates. If you need advice or counsel, you go to the elders in the gates.
So now Jacob has something very wonderful. He says, “This is the home of God.” Did you get it? Home of God.
Very sadly, in Christian circles we have become so used to the phrase “house of God” that we think of it as a structure in which congregations meet to sing hymns and say prayers. But think for a moment. If I said to you, “I have a house in Richmond, England,” would you think, “Oh, Lance has got a structure in which they sing hymns and say prayers”? No, you would not think that.
What would you think if I said, “I have a house in Richmond”? You would think, “He has got a home.” Is that not normal? You would think he has got a home.
If you say to me, “My house is in Pasadena, or Santa Barbara, or San Francisco”—I have always liked San Francisco best anyway. If you Americans say it has awful weather, I think it is beautiful. Compare it with British weather; I think San Francisco’s weather is the nicest thing you could come up with.
Anyway, if you say to me, “My house is in San Francisco,” I do not think you have a structure there in which people sit in serried ranks, sing hymns, say a few prayers, and someone spouts at them for a while.
What do I understand when you say that your house is in San Francisco? I know exactly what you mean. You have got your dwelling place. That is your home. That is where you rest. That is where you let your hair down. That is where you take your shoes off and walk around just as you want. It is home.
Jacob said, “This”—this what? This ladder set up on earth, its top reaching heaven, angels of God ascending and descending, and the Lord standing over it, toward it, and toward me—“this is the home of God. This is the dwelling place of God. This is the resting place of God. This is where God is at home. This is where God feels absolutely at rest.”
This is the gate of heaven. This is where the will of God is known. This is where things are defined. This is where the counsel of God is expressed. This is where things are cleared up.
Jesus put it so simply:
Upon this rock I will build My church;
and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
Unto thee have I given the keys of the kingdom of heaven;
and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven,
and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.
First, the church. On this rock He will build this house, His home, the habitation of God in the Spirit. The gates of hell will not prevail against it. It is predestined by God. It is all to do with the election of God.
Satan can do nothing but help the work in the long run.
Then He says, “You have the keys of the kingdom.” What do you do with keys? You lock things up. What do you do with keys? You unlock them.
Are there not times when hell wants to swamp the building work of the Lord Jesus, paralyze it, hinder it, frustrate it? Of course. Then you and I have got to know what it is to be for the house of God, to be the gate of heaven.
We have got to know the counsel of God in this matter. We must know when there are times to take executive action in the name of the Lord Jesus and lock the gate. We cannot lock what it is not the will of heaven to lock. But when the will of heaven is to bind something, we can say, “It is done,” and heaven says, “Done.”
And we can unlock. Are there not many captives locked up in that whole realm of darkness, under the powers of darkness, bound in blindness and sin, who long to come out? The elect people of God—we must unlock the gates and let them out.
It is not good enough for us to sit in our little companies, our little “bless me” companies, singing little hymns, studying the Bible here and there, and engaging in general chit-chat of a spiritual kind, when all around us is a dying nation.
When all around us is a dying world, we could not care less at times. We give the impression that they can go to hell for all we care. We have neighbours in our streets and people we work with; we have never wept for them, never had a broken heart for them, never felt any pain in our heart for them. We do not spend half an hour in prayer for them.
We do not know how to use these keys of the kingdom of heaven. If there were something in us that broke with anguish over what is going on around us, we would seek the Lord for divine authority. We would seek the Lord for spiritual authority.
We would say, “Oh God, what is this about Thy house? What is it that we are supposed to be? Are we supposed to be a congregation of units, a little Bible-study circle, just a little group of units with very little relationship to one another other than that they are saved? Or are we living stones, to be built up a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ?”
House of God. Gate of heaven. How dreadful is this place!
When I think about it, it is to me so great, so amazing. What does it mean, angels of God ascending and descending? Surely it means that we on earth, in our relationship to our Lord, receive burdens. As we get these burdens, somehow something starts to happen.
Something starts to happen, and angels of God start to move.
I wish believers understood at least what Jewish believers used to understand under the old covenant: that when at least ten people are met together to worship God, the angels of God start. You say, “Oh, I think that is an old wives’ tale.” No, just you wait.
Many of the hymns we sing call upon the angels to help us. Has any of you ever thought about it? We sing marvelous hymns about angels: “Help us to adore Him; ye behold Him face to face,” and many other hymns that you know.
What is it all based on? It is based upon this marvelous thought that these angels are sent to be ministers to those who are heirs of salvation. How are they our servants? How are they our ministers? They help us to worship. They help us to serve in the background.
They do not draw attention to themselves, but in the background they are all the time helping us, enabling us, channeling grace to us, delivering us, stopping us from this and that. We do not know half the things the angels preserve us from.
When we meet together like this, there is angelic activity everywhere; only we cannot see it. If our eyes were opened like Elisha’s servant’s, we would see the whole mountain filled with the angels of God.
“Oh no, no, no, no, no, no—that is Old Testament mythology.” Many believers believe it is Old Testament mythology. They believe in the inspiration of the Word, but they still think, “No, no, no. Things like that—angels of God.”
Because we imagine them all with great big wings, and soup plates of gold over their heads, and all that kind of thing. Whereas sometimes angels look so much like human beings that many times they could be mistaken for a human being. Only when they vanish does someone realize an angel had come.
I always think it is so lovely, you sisters, where it says, “Do not forget to exercise hospitality, for some in so doing entertained angels unawares.” That ought to give you a boost for hospitality. Maybe one day you will get an angel unawares. You never know, dear. One of these days it might happen again, and an angel might be there and you do not even know about it.
Well, that is a digression. We must forget that. Come back again to this matter of angelic activity.
When God’s people take the foundation of the Lord Jesus Christ and start to allow the Holy Spirit to build them as living stones, one to another, into that house of the Lord—to be a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices—then all the angelic activity starts. Angels ascend and descend.
Oh, would to God that in the companies we represent there were this angelic activity. I fear that in many there is no such thing. There is neither a ladder nor any angels of God ascending or descending. The whole thing is static. We are living in a day when many play at churches.
I remember twenty-five years ago, when I first began to minister, and when God began to show me something about the house of God. Wherever I went, I spoke about the house of God and the body of Christ. People’s mouths used to drop open. Then people would come up afterwards and say, “Why have we not heard this before?”
They treated you as if there must be something erroneous or heretical about it, because there were no books written on the subject, no one ever talked about it, and there were no hymns written on the subject. So there must be something funny about it. Yet when they looked at the Book, there was so much about it.
Now the whole climate has changed. Due to that great moving of the Holy Spirit, with all its excesses and imbalances and much else, something has happened over the whole face of the earth.
Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of the people of God talk about the body of Christ, the church of God, the house of God, being living stones, body ministry, and the gifts of the Spirit being exercised to the building up of the body.
I know there is still much blindness and much power to be, but what a change. Today we suffer not from ignorance on this matter, but from people who use the terms without understanding them.
People come up to me and say, “We have got a body in Chicago.” I cannot understand it. Then they say, “Oh, we have got a body in Atlanta.” I cannot understand it. They send a whole group of people there and say, “The church is now in Atlanta,” because they have sent a whole lot of people to Atlanta. You import the thing. I do not understand it.
I quite agree that if you have believers coming, that is one thing. But to artificially do all this kind of thing—is this the house of God? It is not the house of God, I find.
I find the house of God where the preaching comes and men and women get saved. Now, if others join them from elsewhere, that is a different matter; they take root. But there is so much that now is artificial.
Thank God, the climate has changed at least. Now everybody wants to hear about the house of God. “What is this about the house of God? What does it really mean?”
Oh, dear people of God, if only we had this revelation that Jacob had. We have so many privileges, so many advantages. If only we had even a little of the understanding that he had.
Now, once again, I must, I think, finish. But before I do so, I should like to take you to the Gospel of John, and we will close there, because here we have a most remarkable thing.
I will read from John 1:47:
Jesus saw Nathanael coming to Him, and saith of him, Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile.
No Jacob. Nathanael saith unto Him, “Whence knowest Thou me?” Jesus answered and said unto him, “Before Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee.”
Nathanael answered Him, “Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God; Thou art the King of Israel.” There you have 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 2 Kings.
Jesus answered and said unto him, “Because I said unto thee, I saw thee underneath the fig tree, believest thou? Thou shalt see greater things than these.” And He saith unto him:
Verily, verily, I say unto you, ye shall see heaven opened,
and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.
Have you ever noticed that? The Lord Jesus began by saying, “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no Jacob.” Then He went on and said, “You say that I am the King of Israel, the Son of God. I say you are going to see greater things than these.”
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, ye shall see heaven open, and angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.” The ladder is the Son of Man.
Jesus is the connection between heaven and earth, between earth and heaven. He is the means of intercourse. He is the means of interchange. He is the means of communication. He is the means by which we know the will of God and can do the will of God.
Oh, how wonderful! Think of it. I think sometimes our conception of the church is so poor, so petty. We think of it merely as a pattern, merely as a kind of structure, merely as something in which we have elders and deacons and the Lord’s table and all these things. We argue backwards and forwards about it all, but essentially that is not the house of God.
There will come a time when there will be no more elders and deacons, when there will be no more Lord’s table. But the house of God is forever. So we need to go right to the heart of the matter and find: What is this house of God?
Listen, dear believer. You may at first not fully understand, but it is nothing less than the Lord Jesus. Then it is you and I in Him. Then it is a marvelous communication between earth and heaven, and heaven and earth.
Oh, I wish we could understand this. It would be so wonderful, would it not?
I read in Romans 12:4-5:
For even as we have many members in one body,
and all the members have not the same office;
so we, who are many, are one body in Christ,
and severally members one of another.
Is that not interesting? Not just one body of Christ, but one body in Christ.
Look again at 1 Corinthians 12:12:
For as the body is one, and hath many members,
and all the members of the body, being many, are one body,
so also is Christ.
It does not say, “So also is the body of which Christ is the Head.” It says, “So also is Christ.” Many members, one body—so is Christ.
Now we must be careful in this truth. There are those who have taken it so far that our Lord, instead of being seen and understood objectively as the One at the right hand of God the Father, has become a thing—something we digest, something we breathe, something we feed on.
We must be careful. This is only one side of the truth. Jesus Himself said, “You must eat My flesh and drink My blood.” It is absolutely true, but we must always be careful to recognize that in understanding the Lord in this way, He is the Person of the Son.
He is, as Man, at the right hand of God the Father, and He is going to come back. He is not some vast, impersonal thing, some great powerful resurrection life. He is a Person: Someone to know, Someone to discover, Someone to walk with, Someone to be one with, Someone for whom we are being prepared as a bride, to be the wife of the Lamb.
Yet we have to understand this wonderful thing: the church is nothing less than the Lord Jesus and you and me in Him. How wonderful. How wonderful.
Are you ready for another Scripture? You know it all so well, I am quite sure. Ephesians 2:21:
In whom the whole building, fitly framed together,
groweth into a holy temple in the Lord.
You could not get it more clearly. In whom? In Christ. The whole building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord.
In whom ye also are builded together
for a habitation of God in the Spirit.
Would it not be a wonderful thing if everything called a church was under an open heaven? Do you know what that means—an open heaven? It means you can get through to heaven and heaven can get through to you.
I always get very bothered by some of our companies because it is all one-way traffic. We come, we sing hymns to Him, we pray to Him, and we preach His Word. But we would drop dead if He said, “Just wait. I want to say something.”
Is that not true? Our idea of prayer is that we do all the talking. We would fall over backwards if He said, “Now, what you were just asking Me—I want to say this.”
That is why I believe the real house of God has always been charismatic essentially. The charismatic is not just gifts—speaking in tongues, prophecy, and other gifts. The charismatic is essentially being alive to God.
The wages of sin is death, but the charisma of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. This comes again and again, this use of charisma linked with eternal life. You are alive to God. You are not just a dummy. You do not only talk to God; you hear God.
In many companies, I think that is all the angels could ever do: they carry all the messages outward. They are unable to bring anything back because the company is not there to hear.
There is a sister in Jerusalem—may this tape never get there—who regularly rings me up. As soon as I hear her voice on the phone, I know that she is going to be there for at least twenty-five minutes.
Although she always prefaces the thing with, “Now I need your advice and help and fellowship,” before I can say a thing, she is off. I have got to know her over the years. I know it is a very wicked thing to confess, but what I now do is quietly put the phone down and go on with whatever I am doing.
Then in a few minutes I pick it up and say, “Yes, yes, yes,” and put it down again and go on. When it comes to just before twenty-five minutes, I pick it up, and she says, “Well, thank you very much for listening to all this,” and puts the phone down before I have a chance to say anything.
What kind of fellowship is it? What kind of advice does she want? What kind of counsel does she want? But listen, most of us do this with the Lord. We rush into His presence and pour out all that: “Oh Lord, this and this and this and this and this and this and this. Thank You, Lord, I am off to work.”
In our prayer meetings we say, “Oh Lord, we do not understand why this has happened to Mrs. So-and-so. Lord, meet her, answer her, do this and this and this.” Then we are off to the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. We never give the Lord a chance to speak to us.
Sometimes the Lord would like angels to descend. The church is not just ascending angels; it is descending angels. Sometimes the Lord wants to get something through to us. He wants to say, “Listen.” Sometimes the Lord knows it is no good. I am not being unkind; I am sure He puts the phone down and gets on with something else.
Some people would be physically sick if the Lord actually answered their prayer. “I want to know, Lord, about this and this.” If the Lord said, “Just wait. You shall do this and this and this”—but we do not give the Lord that chance.
The church is not one-way traffic; it is two-way traffic. The tragedy of church life is that it never hears its Head. It never hears what the Spirit is saying to the churches.
It has got so busy, so filled with knowledge, so involved in its routine of Bible studies, prayer meetings, evangelistic activity, or whatever—sometimes even the deeper things—that it does not hear Him.
He has to bang on the door outside and say:
Behold, I stand at the door, and knock:
if any man hear My voice, and open the door,
I will come in.
This is the church of which He is Head. We normally take Revelation 3:20 for unsaved people, but in the first place it was given to believers—to a born-again church that had become lukewarm and very self-satisfied. There was no two-way traffic. God could not get through to them. Jesus was actually outside, knocking.
I do not know whether the Lord is outside your life knocking. Have you got that kind of neurotic syndrome where you tell Him everything, ask Him everything, but never in the whole wide world expect Him to answer? “Me? He would not talk to me. Maybe He would talk to Brother Lance, but He would not talk to me.”
Jesus said, “My sheep hear My voice.”
Some people go deaf, you know, because they do not want to hear. I know when I was a little boy I had some deafness problem, and it greatly worried my grandmother. My mother was too shrewd, but my grandmother was a dear. Grandmothers and their grandchildren normally have a much better relationship because they do not have too many responsibilities.
She thought, “I will take you along to a specialist,” which she did at her own expense. The specialist went everywhere, and finally he took her into another room and said some things to my grandmother. I, of course, was absolutely in the dark.
It was very interesting, because every time I was told to do something, I did not hear.
But Grandmother stood at the door one day and, in a very soft whisper, said, “Lance, would you like some apple tart?” And then I said, “Yes.”
The specialist’s diagnosis was proved. He said, “I think the boy is very strong-willed. He does not want to hear what he does not want to hear.”
He said, “I suggest that you ask him, in a whisper, something he likes very much and see if he hears it.” Well, I did. So I never had to have an operation on my ear or anything else. It was just the strength of mind.
Do you know, some of us are just like that with the Lord. We are so strong-souled, so forceful. We have our own ideas, our own conceptions, even our own biblical knowledge. It carries us along with tremendous force, and we are deaf to Him.
We mean well, but we are deaf.
What a wonderful thing this is, this house of God. I wish there was an open heaven over every company that was called a church.
Over many of them there can be no open heaven. They are not on that foundation of the Lord Jesus, but on a foundation which is less or other.
But wherever there is a company of people that can come together upon that foundation of the Lord Jesus Christ, owning His name and no other, as living stones committed to Him as the chief cornerstone, elect and precious, and then committed to one another in Him, then I believe there can be an open heaven.
For there is no open heaven over me. The only open heaven is over the Lord Jesus. But when I am in the Lord Jesus, then I find an open heaven. I find that heaven is absolutely open.
All power, all grace, all wisdom, all provision—every single thing I need—is mine in Him. There is an open heaven.
We, as the people of God, may know tremendous conflict, tremendous battle, tremendous antagonism from invisible beings, apart from flesh and blood. But if we are in Christ, there is an open heaven. There are angels ascending and descending.
How wonderful it is when the Spirit of God, in answer to our calling and our cry, our appeal to heaven, manifests Himself in newborn faith. So that the gift of faith is manifested in this one, and it becomes infectious.
Someone in the prayer meeting says, “Thank God, I know, I know that You are going to win this battle.” Immediately it is an amen made an amen and an amen, and the whole thing comes out of the heaviness. Angels have ascended with the cry; an angel has descended with faith.
Maybe this sounds very Sunday school, but you get what I am talking about. Here again, we are saying, “Oh Lord, we do not understand this problem that has come to us as a company, or is facing us as the work of God. It seems so complex. What is it, Lord? What is it?”
As we pray, some dear little soul, often a sister—she cannot even speak the Queen’s English—comes up afterwards and says, “Brother, brother, I do not know whether I should say this. But whilst we were praying, I felt—well, I do not know whether I should be dogmatic that it was the Lord—but I felt that the Lord said to me this and this and this, and we should do this and this.”
Then I clutch my head and think, “Oh Lord, how can I be so dull? Here is an old sister in the company who has never been to a theological seminary or Bible school, has never preached a message in her life, and cannot even speak the Queen’s English. We have been praying for a whole night or two, and now she has brought the answer. What is wrong with us all?”
I could kick the other brothers. Why did they not get the answer? But in the body of Christ, God chooses sometimes the weakest members to do the biggest things, that there be no schism in the body.
We who have responsibility can be very high-handed and very big. We can sometimes tremble over some of these people with their feelings, but sometimes it is the voice of God. An angel has descended. It is a word of wisdom.
You know what wisdom is? The application of facts—what to do with them. Knowledge is just the facts; wisdom is what to do with them.
Oh, do we not sometimes need knowledge? Do we not sometimes need to know what the facts are? Is it the enemy? Sometimes in one of our companies we feel as if everything is so heavy, so dark, and we all start to blame one another.
In the end, we are all at sixes and sevens, fighting one another. “It is brother so-and-so. It is sister so-and-so. It is this. It is that. It is the other.” And it is not anything at all.
If we were only to seek the Lord and hear the Lord, maybe He would say, “Stand fast. An enemy has come in and is seeking not to allow this work to go one step further.”
Well, that is just an understanding. It is a word of knowledge. We now understand where we are. Now we can do something. It is an enemy. Close ranks. This is not flesh and blood. This is an enemy at work. Let us stand against him and praise the Lord.
What happens? We find the whole thing lives. Is that not amazing? I do not know if you have had this experience, but when you have, over years, had experience after experience, you know there is something in this thing. This works.
This is none other than the house of God and the gate of heaven. This is angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man. Heaven is receiving communications and making communications. The will of God is being done. Oh, praise God!
Well, are you a vessel of mercy? Is it not something of great comfort to you and me that it was to Jacob—the swindler, the extortioner, the deceiver, the man who could not cope with his own nature, with his own will, because it was too powerful, too strong, too energetic—that God revealed what the house of God was all about?
He did not reveal it so much to Abraham, although Abraham saw the city which hath foundations. But it was to Jacob that He revealed the heart of the matter in the city and showed this house of the Lord.
Oh, I wish that you saw this. I wish that I saw it more clearly. I wish that we were in the experience of it.
Oh, would to God that men and women in this dying world, touching us, would touch heaven. They would say, “How dreadful is this place!” Conviction of sin would come. Conviction of need would come. Conviction of the truth as it is in Jesus would come.
They would touch us as the body of the Lord and say, “God is here,” and would fall down and worship, even as unsaved men and women. It happens.
Wherever there is a real building work, wherever there is a real functioning of the house of God, wherever there is a functioning in the body of Christ, then it is God meeting men and men meeting God. It is the gate of heaven.
Then all these things we have talked about become true. We possess our possessions. We multiply. We become a blessing to others. We become princes with God and with men.
God do it for us. Shall we pray?
Oh Lord, we all have to say, when we really face this matter of Thy house and this open heaven, and these angels of Thine ascending and descending upon our Lord Jesus, we just have to say, Father, that we all fall so far short.
O God, reveal this thing to our hearts. Thou hast called us in Thy Word living stones. Thou hast called us the church which Thou art building, against which the gates of hell shall not prevail.
Lord, bring us into the reality. O God, we are all Jacobs underneath. To Jacob Thou didst reveal these things; reveal it to us, O God. May we begin to see this thing.
May we begin to be able to speak of the God of the house of God—not just the house of God, but the God of the house of God.
Lord, help us, we pray. May we get a new understanding of the house of God, of the church of God, of the body of our Lord Jesus. Burn it into us, Lord, so it comes into our hearts as a challenge which will lead to a commitment to Thyself.
And we ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.
Now, we are going to sing a hymn, I believe. I cannot remember the number. Two hundred and thirty-eight.
Two hundred and thirty-eight: “The Church’s One Foundation.” Shall we stand? I am sure you will be cramped sitting on the—