NOTE. The following
message is the first of one of the series given at the
conference in Switzerland this year [1964]. It is printed
here practically as it was spoken. In due course we
expect that the whole series will be published in book
form.
"Didst not
thou, O our God, drive out the inhabitants of this land
before thy people Israel, and gavest it to the seed of
Abraham thy friend for ever?" (2 Chronicles
20:7).
"But thou,
Israel, my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, the seed of
Abraham my friend" (Isaiah 41:8).
"And the
scripture was fulfilled which saith, And Abraham believed
God, and it was reckoned unto him for righteousness; and
he was called the friend of God" (James 2:23).
We have announced that
in these evening gatherings our subject is going to be:
"Into the Heart of God", and when we speak
about the heart of God, we mean friendship with God, for
friendship means that the one has entered into the heart
of the other. It is a matter of heart relationship.
It is a wonderful thing
that that is possible between man and God! It was God who
said of David that he was "a man after my
heart" (Acts 13:22), and we have read
that three times in the Bible Abraham was called 'the
friend of God'. Indeed, God Himself said of him:
"Abraham, my friend" which means that he had
entered into the heart of God. That entering was
progressive. It did not happen all at once, but was a
lifelong movement, a spiritual pilgrimage which ended in
the heart of God. It had eight distinct stages - there
were eight different movements in the life of Abraham
which ended right there in the heart of God, and we shall
hope to consider some of these stages.
First of all, however,
let us remind ourselves that the Word of God reveals that
there is a spiritual pilgrimage. Peter said: "Beloved,
I beseech you as sojourners and pilgrims" (1
Peter 2:11), and the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews
put it in this way: "These all died in faith,
not having received the promises, but having seen them
and greeted them from afar, and having confessed that
they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they
that say such things make it manifest that they are
seeking after a country of their own... But now they
desire a better country, that is, a heavenly"
(Hebrews 11:13,14,16). You see what that says: They
all died in faith not having received the promises. They
had seen them and greeted them from a long way off. All
these heroes of faith mentioned in that eleventh chapter
of the Letter to the Hebrews are still looking for a
country, that is, waiting for their inheritance, and
chapter twelve makes it quite clear that although they
have left this earth, they are one with us in 'looking'.
They "all died in faith, not having received the
promises... God having foreseen some better thing
concerning us, that apart from us they should not be
made perfect" (Hebrews 11:1,40. R.V. margin). So
Abraham is still 'looking' with us for the heavenly
country.
There is a whole group
of New Testament words which describe the believer as a
pilgrim and a stranger, and these many Greek words relate
to people in the Roman Empire who had no settled abode
anywhere. They were just visitors to the place. They had
come to stay for a night, for a week, for a month, or for
a year, but no matter how long they stayed, they did not
belong to the place. They had no permanent residence
there, and our New Testament is built upon that truth.
All these Greek words are taken over and applied to
Christians. When Peter said: "I beseech you as
sojourners and pilgrims", he did not
say: 'Be pilgrims and sojourners' but 'You are'.
The first five books of
the Bible are books of a pilgrimage. The Bible opens with
man at home. God had made a home for man, and he was
there with God in that home. It was called 'Paradise';
but man lost his home, was driven out from it, and he
became a stranger, a homeless stranger, a displaced
person. He was a wanderer in the earth and a foreigner to
God's home, all because he was out of friendship with
God. When that friendship broke down, man lost his home,
and he has been a pilgrim and stranger in the earth ever
since. There is no restful home for the soul of man in
this world because the world is no friend of God. That is
how the Bible begins, and then that truth is broken up,
firstly in the case of Abraham. All through his life
Abraham was a pilgrim. We are told that he lived in a
tent, and he moved up and down the land with that tent.
You may think it is all right to be in a tent for a
week's holiday (although that depends upon circumstances)
but I doubt whether there is anyone here who would like
to spend their whole life in a tent. Abraham was one of
those of whom it is written: "They are seeking
after a country of their own" - a place which
they could call 'home'.
We pass from Abraham to
Israel, who for forty years of their life were pilgrims
and strangers in a wilderness. God had promised them all
a home, a rest at the end of the journey, but they never
received that promise in their lifetime - "These
all died in faith, not having received the
promises". Even when they went into the land of
promise they never had rest. Why was this so? Because
they were in a world which God had rejected and
repudiated, a world with which God was not in friendship,
and a world which was no friend of God.
That brings us to our
first stage in the spiritual pilgrimage, and we must look
at other passages of Scripture.
"Now these are
the generations of Terah. Terah begat Abraham, Nahor, and
Haran; and Haran begat Lot. And Haran died in the
presence of his father Terah in the land of his nativity,
in Ur of the Chaldees" (Genesis 11:27,28).
"Now the Lord
said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from
thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto the land
that I will shew thee: and I will make of thee a great
nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great;
and be thou a blessing: and I will bless them that bless
thee, and him that curseth thee will I curse: and in thee
shall all the families of the earth be blessed. So Abram
went, as the Lord had spoken unto him; and Lot
went with him" (Genesis 12:1-4).
"And Terah look
Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran, his son's son,
and Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram's wife; and
they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go
into the land of Canaan" (Genesis 11:31).
God had said to
Abraham: 'Get thee out of thy country, thy kindred, thy
father's house, unto a land that I will give thee'. Many
hundreds of years afterward Stephen said: "The
God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham, when he
was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Haran"
(Acts 7:2). How I would like to stay here to tell you
something about Ur of the Chaldees! What a great city it
was, and what a wonderful civilisation existed right back
there at that time! I would like, too, to tell you
something about father Terah, and about his three sons,
the eldest of whom was Abraham, and about the kind of
life they were living in that great city; of how the son,
Haran, died there, and of how Haran's son, Lot, joined
himself to Uncle Abraham, but time will not allow us to
talk about all that, however interesting it may be. We
have to come to this first step into the heart of God.
God had said
emphatically and precisely. "Get thee out"!
In those words it is quite evident that God had
repudiated the old world of Abraham, and, so far as he
was concerned, had finished with it, and finished with it
in finality. In effect, He said to Abraham: 'Now that is
absolutely finished with for you'.
This marks the first
step into the heart of God. God's heart was not in
Chaldea, but outside of Chaldea.
Now mark carefully:
this was not a stage in the spiritual journey, but
a definite, basic step. There was a point at which
one foot of Abraham was in Chaldea and the other was
outside, and when he lifted that one foot and put it at
the side of the other he had crossed the line. There was
just a line between Chaldea and outside of Chaldea. In
our New Testament language: between the world and outside
of the world. It was intended by God to be absolute and
final at that point. He was allowing no compromise -
Abraham's heart had to go over the line toward the heart
of God. All the phases and the stages will follow that.
This basic decision and step will afterward be applied
and tested all through his life. Many situations, many
trials and many difficulties will arise to challenge that
step, and every one of those circumstances will ask the
question: Did you really mean it when you began? How far
did you really mean it when you said that you were going
all the way with God?
You see, there stands
right at the beginning of the spiritual pilgrimage, which
ends in the heart of God, this crisis: the crisis which
is in these words of God - "Get thee out"!
All God's intention and purpose are bound up with our
reaction to that first command.
Perhaps many of you
older Christians do not need this word, but there are a
number of young people, and there may be some older in
years who are young in the journey. What God is saying is
this: If you are at all concerned with finding a place in
the heart of God, this is where you must begin. You must
come to this first step of oneness with God in His
repudiation of this world.
You see, what we are
concerned with is the heart of God, that is,
friendship with God. It is said of Noah that in building
the ark "he condemned the world" (Hebrews
11:7). It was not a matter of whether the world believed
that it was being condemned. The fact is that it was a
condemned world, and it was only a matter of time before
the flood came and destroyed it. It was a good thing that
there were eight persons in the heart of God! They
escaped the coming judgment.
Jesus made this basic
separation from the world when He was baptized, and used
His baptism as a means of declaring to heaven, to men and
to hell that His heart was separated unto God. At His
baptism Jesus took sides with the heart of God against
this world, and declared that His heart was not in this
world - it was with the Father. Every Christian is
supposed to be baptized. You may have different opinions
as to what it is, how it should be, but if you are going
to take Jesus as your example, and what the New Testament
teaches on this matter, you have to recognize that
baptism is a declaration that you have stepped over a
line and that now your heart is wholly with God and out
of the world. No sooner had Jesus been baptized than He
began to be tested as to the step which He had taken.
Those temptations in the wilderness by the devil were to
test Him as to whether He meant what He had done. Satan
offered Him all the kingdoms of this world and all the
glory thereof, and the test was: Was the heart of Jesus
out of the world or not? He stood faithfully to the
position that He had taken and repudiated the world, and
if you want to know what Jesus thought about the world
you have only to read one chapter in the New Testament -
the seventeenth chapter of the Gospel by John. There
Jesus refers repeatedly to the world and prays that His
disciples might be delivered from it. He said: "They
are not of the world, even as I am not of the world"
(John 17:16).
Now notice something:
What was the world to which Jesus was referring? The only
world that the disciples knew was the religious world,
and that was the only world that Jesus lived in in the
days of His flesh. What do you mean by the world? You
see, it can be a very religious thing. There can be a lot
of worldly religion - there can be as much of the world
in religion as there is out of it. The world is a spirit,
a mentality, a power. In one word, it is all that which
is not in friendship with God.
God was no friend of
that religious world in the days of Jesus. The world
means independence from God, being able to get on without
Him in its own way. It is self-centred, not God-centred;
it is governed, deceived and blinded by Satan.
Now the point is just
this: We shall never get anywhere in this spiritual
pilgrimage until we have fully and finally settled this
one question. One of the most painful things that we see
is the way in which all young Christians do not go on
with the Lord. They come to a point where they say that
they are going with the Lord, they make a decision for
the Lord, and there it stops. So many do not go any
further than that - and here is all this immense purpose
of God. They have only taken the negative side of His
command and have not listened to the positive side: "Unto
the land that I will shew thee..." ... 'I will
make thee a blessing and thou shalt be a blessing' ... "in
thee shall all the families of the earth be
blessed".
You see, God has called
us 'out' for a mighty 'in'. He did not
just say to Abraham "Get thee out"!
The separation was governed by the great purpose of being
made a mighty blessing to others.
One world is
repudiated, but God does not believe in vacuums, so He
must put another world in its place. Abraham was God's
new beginning for a new world. He was called "the
father of a multitude of nations" (Genesis
17:5). The father gives the character to the family, and
the very first thing about the character of this man was
that his heart was wholly set on God. If we are truly
spiritual children of Abraham, we must take his
character.
Well, that is where we
begin, the first step in the spiritual pilgrimage to the
heart of God. Whatever we may say about ourselves, in our
faults and failures, may it be true of every one of us
that we have a heart wholly for God, for this is the way
that ends with God being able to say, of you and of me,
"My Friend".