Will you please turn to the second book of Samuel. The second book
of Samuel, firstly in chapter 5:
"Then came all the tribes of Israel to David unto Hebron, and spake
saying, Behold we are bone, we are thy bones and thy flesh. In times
past, when Saul was king over us, it was thou that leddest out and
broughtest in Israel. And the Lord said to thee, Thou shalt feed my
people Israel, and thou shalt be leader over Israel. So all the
elders of Israel came to the king to Hebron and king David made a
covenant with them in Hebron before the Lord. And they anointed
David king over Israel."
Chapter 19, at verse 10, second part of verse 8:
"Now all Israel had fled every man to his tent. And all the people
were at strife throughout all the tribes of Israel saying, The king
delivered us out of the hand of our enemies, and he saved us out of
the hand of the Philistines. And now he is fled out of the land from
Absalom. And Absalom, whom we anointed over us is dead in battle.
Now, therefore, why speak ye not a word of bringing the king back.
King David sent to Zadok and to Abiathar the priest saying, Speak
unto the children of Israel, saying, Why are ye the last to bring
the king back to his house, seeing the speech of all Israel is come
to the king to bring him to his house? Ye are my brethren. Ye are my
bone and my flesh, wherefore then are ye the last to bring back the
king? Say ye to Amassah, Art thou not my bone and my flesh? God do
so to me and more also if thou be not captain of the host before me
continually in the room of Joab. And he bowed the heart of all the
men of Judah, even as the heart of one man, so that they sent unto
the king saying, Return thou, and all thy servants. So the king
returned, and came to Jordan."
Having spent this day in the second chapter of the book of the Acts,
I think we can say that the thing which has been uppermost, foremost
in our consideration as the preeminent work of the Holy Spirit on
His coming, was the proclamation, the demonstration of the fact that
the King was in His place and the kingdom was come. We can say, I
think quite truly, that the book of the Acts is the account of what
things are like when the King is in His place. We so often hark back
to those times, to those days... we so often crave that it might be
like that again. And we so deeply deplore that it is not so with the
church today as it was then... the terrible and pathetic change and
difference now from what it was at that time.
And, dear friends, I am going to suggest to you that the change, the
painful and grievous change, is due to the one thing - that there
came a point at which, so far as the church on the earth was
concerned, the King lost His place; the place that He had had. And
all the trouble of these centuries and today; the weakness that we
deplore, and the many other conditions that we grieve over, all may
be due (very likely is due, and if we think about it enough we shall
go beyond that and say, "Yes, it is due") to this one thing: the
Lord Jesus has not His place that He had at the beginning. That
means that the Holy Spirit has been in some way interrupted in His
great work of making known what it means and what things are like
when the Lord Jesus really has His place. That is the thing - that
is the issue upon which any season of gatherings like this, should
really end. I can conceive of nothing more important, more vital,
more appropriate, than that the last note should be that of the
Lordship of Jesus Christ. Everything must head up to that, and issue
in that.
Now, we have read from the Old Testament in this one book, the
second book of Samuel, of two occasions when the king was out of his
place. The king, of course, in this case, being David. In the book
of the representations, figures and types of heavenly things, of New
Testament things, here we have these two accounts of the two
occasions when David, the anointed of the Lord, was not in his
place. If you read (probably a chapter which you do not read: the
first chapter of the gospel by Matthew 1, that is, all of it!) you
have that long, long list of people who formed the links in the
chain of the ages from the beginning right up to Christ. And there
are forty-two generations. And if you look through that list, you
will not find in the list any mention of Saul or Absalom. Saul, the
king - Absalom the usurper. They were not in the Divine line, of the
Divine choice and appointment for the position that they came to
take. Neither Saul nor Absalom are mentioned in the long chain. They
came in, one by man's choice; the other, by his own personal
ambition. And they represent two factors, two principles (if you
like), two elements that not only have no place in the Divine course
of things, but get in the way of the Divine and, as they did,
bring about a great deal of confusion, and chaos, and suffering, and
loss.
In the case of Saul it was the principle of
worldliness brought into the realm of the kingdom of God:
"Make us a king like unto the nations", said the people, "Give us
that which corresponds to what the world does, and how the world
does it. Give us that which the world chooses and favours for doing
its work; make us a king like unto the nations".
The Worldly Idea and Conception of Government
The thoughts of men, the ideas of men, the things made by men -
machinery constructed by men to run the things of God. That's a
large subject and embraces a very great deal, and covers a lot of
painful history. But that's a principle, a force, a mentality which
displaces the true anointing and the anointed one, the true God-chosen
king.
We who know anything about church history can put our finger fairly
accurately upon the point where that began to come in in the
church's history, when from Holy Spirit order and government - the
absolute Lordship of Jesus Christ - institutions and many other
things were introduced to govern the things of the church and the
kingdom. That word "world" is a very, very big word. And dare I say
it again, it is very impressive, when the Lord Jesus had spent all
that time in instructing His disciples about the new era that was
coming with the Holy Spirit, a long discourse from the table to the
place of prayer, between John 13 and John 17 inclusive. Speaking of
that coming day, His departure, and the coming of the Holy Spirit
it is impressive that as He, having said it all, turned to
prayer. He recognised that the chief enemy of it all was the world,
"They are not of the world even as I am not of the world". How often
that word occurs in that prayer. Yes, world and worldliness in its
spirit and its mind, its methods, and its principles, is a great
enemy to the throne of the Lord Jesus, to His kingship. It is a
matter, dear friends, about which we, the people of God, need all
the time to be very watchful.
The apostle beseeches believers: "Be not conformed to this
world. Do not take the form of this world. Be ye transformed by the
making anew of your mind". There is a kingdom-mindedness that is to
indwell us. Saul, then, is the embodiment of a worldly principle in
the kingdom of God. And look at the result: not only is the truly
anointed king forced out, and driven away, and persecuted, but, as
we shall see in a moment, the consequences were very deplorable.
In the case of Absalom, here we have:
The Personal Ambition and Pride of Man
Forcing itself into the realm of the anointing. There's quite a lot
said about the personality of this young man - the subtlety of his
attractiveness, his manner, and how he sat in the gate and
ingratiated himself with all who came in and went out, and stole
their hearts by fair words. A fair presence with fair words,
deceiving... stealing the heart. Pride in man - ambition in man. I
am not dwelling a lot upon that this evening, although there's a lot
of history there. Just man in his own self-importance getting in the
way of the anointed one.
Now, the strange thing, mysterious thing, the thing that is to us
such a problem, is that the Lord allowed it. The Lord allowed it! He
is the Lord, high over all, everything is under His power and in His
knowledge; and He allowed it. You might even say, so far as Saul was
concerned, He seemed to be a party to it. He allowed this; a
tragic and disastrous thing to happen in both instances. And therein
lies a lesson that we do well to learn. It's a very painful lesson.
It's a very painful thing, this permission of God. Why does
the Lord allow things like this to happen? But He has. And not only
in these cases, but again and again He has allowed that sort of
thing to happen. We have very often cried with that
question: "Why have You allowed this? Why didn't You prevent
it?" Now, you see, that question could apply to the whole state of
this world, couldn't it? But there it is: there was God's allowing,
permission. Why? Just for this: that it is necessary both to God and
to the people concerned, to prove, to prove, to
demonstrate the disaster that comes from His king not being
given His place, or being put out of his place. It is useless to
theorise about this matter, indeed, it is vain to even teach it. We
might here stand behind this table and year after year, and
conference after conference, and week after week, say these
things, with very, very little effect. The Lord finds it His
grievous necessity to let people
prove that if His appointment in His Son Jesus Christ is
violated, the most grievous consequences follow. And that is the way
in which we learn most things, isn't it? By painful experience,
because we don't learn them in any other way, really!
And so the Lord allowed Saul to get in the way of David for a
considerable period. But, my word, the ultimate reaction secured
something and established something stronger than there was before.
The Lord
allowed that scoundrel, for a man who will take it upon him
to kill his own father is nothing less than a scoundrel, seeing who
and what David was, but the Lord allowed him to do it. And we've
read what the people said in the long run. You notice, of Saul, the
Lord said, to Samuel: "They have rejected Me from being
King". "They have rejected." Of Absalom we read the
people said: "The man that we anointed" we anointed.
Not "the man that God anointed", they could never say that; "we,
we"! Therefore, in both cases, the responsibility lay at the
door of the people, and they have got to learn by
grievous experience. And in the end, the man that we anointed is
dead, and the man who really did the work of our salvation has been
driven out. It is terrible, but here it is.
What were the results of God's anointed man, (the type of the Lord
Jesus, we are keeping our eyes on the Lord Jesus), the results of
God's anointed being out of his place? Well, it seemed, for a time,
to go on all right. You know, the Lord is as clever as men, and the
Lord, the Lord can be subtle. And so He gave, in both cases, for a
time, for a period, an apparent success and prosperity, so
that the people began to congratulate themselves, to feel very
pleased with what they had done, and what they were doing. Saul
seemed to be the man; things were going all right. Absalom, well,
yes; it's all right. An absolutely false and illusionary success for
a little while, for a little while. The perpetrators congratulating
themselves! That is a build-up, the overthrow of which is going to
make the ignominy all the greater. The Lord must do that. So, let it
go; let it seem to prosper. Let it seem to be successful - that's
its greater doom in the long run. The disillusionment will be the
more terrible than if God had stepped right in and cut it off from
the beginning. A false prosperity and then, at a point we are not
able to put our finger upon exactly, but it is here in the record,
at a point: an awakening awareness that things were
fundamentally doubtful, a sense creeping in and growing that
somewhere, somehow, things had gone wrong. An apprehension, a
consciousness that things are not as right as was thought, as good
as was imagined. It's coming in.
And you'll find David out there, in the cave of Adullum... there is
a stealthy secession "day by day", it says, "day by day they went
out to him... those who were discontented and in debt" disappointed
and disillusioned, because this thing was not putting them in a
position to meet their obligations. This thing was hollow. And so
they went out... and the number increased. And I would like to have
heard what they said when they got there. I don't think we would be
wrong, or far from the truth, if in our eaves-dropping we heard
them saying: "Look here, we've backed the wrong horse!" May I use
that slang? "We've made a great mistake! We've discovered that what
we thought was the way, was the right thing, was the good thing, the
thing that was going to bring about what we wanted, we've discovered
that we've been on the wrong road; there's something about it that
is all wrong." You notice that in the end, when the real
crisis came, the verdict came out in full: "It was thou, even in
those days when Saul was king, it was thou that leddest, it was thou
that the Lord appointed and said, Thou shalt be leader of My
people". What a confession! What a realisation.
You see, in both cases, it amounted to this: by man's way, man's
worldly way, man's earthly way, man's fleshly way, the whole
principle of spiritual authority was lost. And when that
goes, there will most surely soon set in disintegration, confusion,
frustration, questions and doubts and fears, and growing
acknowledgement that something's wrong; somewhere something's
wrong.
Now, I say that that is true of a very great deal of Christian
realisation and confession in our day. Things are not right...
there's something wrong somewhere; we have lost something, we are
all at sixes and sevens - it's like that. That really does explain
Christianity in a very large measure today, and can be true
of the individual life. It can be true of any companies of the
Lord's people - just like that.
What is the remedy? What is the remedy? How shall this whole thing
be put right on a single issue? I like to think that there's always
one key to many doors, there is one answer to many questions, there
is one issue to a large and many-sided situation. It's usually like
that. It's usually like that, when the Holy Spirit just puts His
finger upon a single point, very often a whole lot of things
collapse. One thing, and the one remedy for all lost cohesion,
power, testimony; for the loss of those conditions which we read in
the book of the Acts, the remedy is: bring back the King!
Bring Back the King!
That's the answer here. And when the king came back into his place,
the situation very quickly changed. It very quickly changed.
It's almost thrilling to see the change or the changes that took
place: the renewed national unity, the renewed national ascendancy.
Read the story; read the context. Why, David is hardly anointed, as
we have read, in Hebron, before the Philistines know all about it.
The Philistines know all about it - that menace to the kingdom, that
long drawn-out menace to the kingdom - they know all about it when
David is in his place, the place to which he was anointed.
The forces of evil will know all about it when Jesus is in His
place; they will. When we're struggling and wrestling unto defeat
with these evil forces, making little or no headway against them,
and they just playing with us... and we need Somebody right at the
heart in control, with absolute authority. The only One appointed
for that is the Lord Jesus. Not in His place... dear friends, maybe He
is not in place in your life, therefore yours is a life of
disintegration, scatteredness, division - a life of defeat and
weakness, a life in which the great enemy is having far, far too
much of his own way. It may be true in some company of the Lord's
people here, as it is true so very largely, without embarking upon
unhappy criticism, it is easy, it is so easy to criticise and judge
Christianity; and yet we all have to recognise that the church of
God is not that force to be reckoned with in this world that it was
at the beginning. These conditions do obtain. The answer: bring back
the King.
Now you can see that has two applications. It has a spiritual one
for the present. A spiritual one for the present: there needs to be
a re-instating of the Lord Jesus in His absolute
authority in the life of the Christian, in the life of the local
company of Christians, and in the church of God at large. I don't
think there's any question that when that is so, we shall see mighty
things happening. We shall again see something, something that
corresponds to this book, when that is so.
Oh, that we might see the
great need of our time. It is, if we use a word concerning a thing,
it is Authority enthroned, but what we mean by "Authority"
is Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit: Lord over
all, high over all. It is the need: bringing back the King
now, in a spiritual way, a spiritual way.
But, of course, it has its dispensational application. Nothing will
be wholly right until He comes whose right it is to reign. Nothing
will be just as it
should be in the purpose of God until the King returns. In
this world we know it's true. The answer? The answer fully and
finally, is the coming again of the Lord. It's the answer. Unto
that, unto that, the whole creation groans; the whole world is in
unrest, waiting His coming.
What will bring Him back? Well, you see if you look at these
accounts again, you will find three things that result in the return
of the King. One,
that they truly learned their lesson. The Lord never, never
moves until that is the case, it may take a long time. It may be a
long drawn-out miserable history. If it's got to be ever so long,
the Lord will not move until the lesson is learned. The one thing
that this world has got to learn, and the one thing that the church
has got to learn, and the one thing that we have got to learn,
is that it is a most disastrous thing for God's anointed
King not to be in His place and for us to come to the place
where we say, and we know, the only thing - the only thing is not
this and that as a remedy - the only thing is the Lord Himself being
where He ought to be, and what He ought to be. We've learned that
through painful experience, and it is something worth learning, and
worth the painfulness. They learned their lesson - it is quite
evident, isn't it? In both cases, they were quite intelligent as to
why it was; the reasons for their state.
The second thing was their confession, which included repentance.
Confession! Confession is a very deep factor, mark you, in the
Lord's new movement - being quite ready to go right down and
acknowledge the failure, the fact of the failure, the cause of the
failure, the thing itself - not just the consequences being felt
badly and you want to get out of them! But no, no: this is wrong
before God. Before God! Before heaven it is wrong. It's all wrong
when Jesus has not His full place, anywhere and everywhere. It's all
wrong.
Repentance, confession, and finally: the quest.
The Quest
I think it's grand, that movement, isn't it, when they, from their
side, said to David: "You are bone of our bone and flesh of our
flesh and all our trouble is because you're not in your place. Come
back! We need you; we must have you; we cannot get on without you!"
That's what it amounts to,
"Our very life and future hangs upon your being where God appointed
you to be" - that's the Lord Jesus. And there must be this quest,
this heart-felt quest.
Dear friends, if what I am saying does not come home to you, because
you feel that this is not true of you, that you have not so behaved
toward Him, that in your case there has been no driving Him out,
won't you join the quest for His church? Won't you join in the quest
for others, for His people? Won't you be the representative of the
nation, like Judah who took the initiative in this matter for
others, for the church's sake, whether it be local or universal?
Won't you be drawn out in this matter for a new instating of the
Lord Jesus? Won't you do that? It's the only solution.
But then as to the dispensational application. There is something to
be done to bring back the King. Although God may have His fixed time
for the next intervention in this world's history, the times and the
seasons which are in His own keeping, there's another side to it -
there is another side. "Shall not God avenge His church which
cries unto Him day and night?" That's a side, see? There is
an earnest looking for and hastening of the day of the Lord Jesus.
There's work to be done. There's the Testimony to go into the
nations. There's the preparation; "for every one who hath this hope
in himself purifieth himself even as He is pure". There is all that
which the Lord must find in us when He comes, and not finding it,
may delay His coming. I don't know whether that is dispensational
truth or not, but I believe it is spiritual truth. The Lord on one
side, waits for His people to be of those who are on stretch for His
coming. And being on stretch, are active, occupying till He comes
and doing everything possible to prepare the way of His coming.
This is Holy Spirit work: to put the King in His place, and to restore
the King if He is not in His place, and to energise us all in this
matter of bringing back the King. "Why speak ye not a word of
bringing back the king?" The answer: because you don't realise that
this is the cause of all the trouble, that He is not where He ought
to be, or that you have settled down to wait for something to
happen. Oh no, the exercise, the quest, the outreach... He has got
to be brought back; that's the point: brought back! You say,
"He's coming!" You say, "He's coming and will come in His appointed
time..." But I say: He is to be brought back! And I, when I say "I
say" I believe that is what the Word of God says: there is something
to be done to bring Him back.
Oh, may we be found in that prayer of
the church... the Spirit and the Bride in combination saying, "Come,
come, and come Lord, come quickly!" in both these senses: now
spiritually, and soon literally.