Total Pageviews

Thursday, September 27, 2012

"Abide Under the Shadow of the Almighty" # 4

Correction of Misconceptions

3. As to Ultimate Vindication

You will notice that this Psalm ends on the note of vindication: "I will show him," God says, "I will show him My salvation." Now that appeals to me, because I want to see, and we all want to see, don't we? We are perhaps wrong in our desires, in some ways; but fundamentally we may expect - and I think it is right that we should expect - that ultimately God will make manifest that we have taken the right course - that this has been right. "I will show him My salvation." But, in our desire to see, we want to much too quickly, and we want it our own way. So, once again, we must come back to the Lord Jesus, to have our thoughts checked and measured up against reality and truth as seen in Him.

We see, of course, that God did vindicate Him. All these assertions were fulfilled in His case. "I will set Him on high ... I will be with Him; I will deliver Him; I will honor Him. With long life will I satisfy Him, and show Him My salvation." That is true. The Father turns to the Son today, and points perhaps to a gathering of His people, and says, Look! I am showing You what has come from Your walk with Me. It was fruitful; it has proved right. Why was all this done? Why is the Lord Jesus so highly exalted, vindicated, justified, satisfied? Well, we do not have to guess, because it is written here: "Because He has set His love upon Me." "Because He has set his love upon Me"! - all this has been made possible. But if you remember, in the case of the Lord Jesus, for quite a time it did not look like it; none of these things was manifest. As a Man here on earth, He did not see a single thing of those mentioned here. He had to wait; He had to keep on setting His love, right through to Calvary, and wait. On the other side of Calvary, in resurrection and ascension, He has been vindicated and justified.

The Lord says to us: "You have got to abide in the secret place; that is your business. There are troubles all around you: you cannot deal with them, but you keep close to Me, and I will deal with them. There are subtle temptations of satan, which will catch you, however zealous you are, and desirous of serving Me, but you keep close to Me, and I will deliver you from all the temptations." And He says to us: "Are you disappointed? Are you wishing you could see? Are you pained and troubled because you do not see? You must be patient; you must set your love upon Me; you must not be governed, guided, moved from your pathway by what is seen - whether good or apparently evil; you must abide under the shadow of the Almighty."

In eternity, supremely, God will fulfill this to those who have followed Christ all the way; in time, also, in some very real measure, God does honor these promises and answer them. But they are always, as it were, some resurrection that emerges out of a crucifixion, some Divine reward for sustained faithfulness to Himself. Remember, when the Lord Jesus began to talk to His disciples, one of the matters which He so greatly stressed, which seems to me to emerge immediately from what I have been saying, was: "Your Father Who seeth in secret shall reward you openly!" (Matthew 6:4, 6, 18). How many times did He say that in the Sermon of the Mount? He entered His ministry, He entered His public life, with this conviction: My supreme and only task is to keep close to the Father in secret, and He will reward; in due time He will reward Me openly.

Let us seek grace, then, to abide in the secret place with Him.

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(the end)

No comments:

Post a Comment