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Gods Inheritance of Glory in Sons

by T. Austin-Sparks

Messages given in April, 1953. Edited and supplied by the Golden Candlestick Trust.

Contents

Chapter 1 - The Great Background of the Christian Life

Chapter 2 - David an Illustration of the Meaning of Sonship

Chapter 3 - David and the Principles of Sonship

Chapter 4 - "Skilful in Playing"

Chapter 5 - "A Mighty Man of Valour"

Chapter 6 - A Foretasting of the Glory in Terms of Praise

Chapter 7 - "A Man of War"

Chapter 8 - "A Man of Good Presence"

Chapter 9 - "Prudent in Matters"

Chapter 10 - The Presence of the Lord

Chapter 11 - The Crowning of the King

Chapter 1 - The Great Background of the Christian Life

"Having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace" (Eph. 1:5-6).

"Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus unto all generations for ever and ever. Amen" (Eph. 3:20-21).

"The Spirit Himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of God: and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified with Him. For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed to us-ward. For the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only so, but ourselves also, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body" (Rom. 8:16-23).

The Ultimate Issue of the Glory of God

Although we are not going to dwell in the letter to the Ephesians, you will have noted that the two passages which we read represent the beginning and the end of God's full intention and purpose for this creation. The beginning takes us right back before the world was - "...having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto Himself". The second passage takes us right on into the ages of the ages - "unto Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus unto the ages of the ages". So far back and far on, the purpose of God is seen in conception, initiation, and far on in realisation and consummation. In between comes that section which we read from the letter to the Romans, and what a great deal is between the beginning and the end, the conceiving and the realisation; what a vast amount is crowded in between the great parenthesis. The people of God with all their experiences of trial, difficulty, adversity, suffering and sorrow and doubts, questions, fears and failures, the whole story of the trials of the people of God, apart from everything else, fills in between "foreordained ... unto adoption" and the realisation of that adoption. But the thing which is said to horizon that whole range of time and all those experiences as a great encompassment of all, governing, ruling and most certainly being the issue of all, is said to be glory, and the glory of God manifested in sons, or in terms of sonship.

The people of God who in all ages do know that the way of fellowship with God, the way of the life of God, the way of the Lord, is a difficult way; what Paul calls here "the sufferings of this present time". They are very real and very personal, but nevertheless said to be governed by ultimate glory and all these experiences, trials, and difficulties, which you and I know in measure, and the people of God have known all through the ages, need an adequate explanation, they need an adequate reason. They need to have an adequate issue, they need to be justified. When we are passing through our difficult times - and when are we not? - one thing which arises in our hearts is the question: 'Is this worthwhile? Is this justified? Is there a good enough reason for an explanation of it?' We must have it all set within the framework of an adequate justification.

And that is exactly where the apostle puts it: "I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed."

Now, while that becomes something for us, our hope, our inheritance, that is not the place where the emphasis is going to be placed in this series of messages. The emphasis is going to be placed upon the glory of God, not, however much it may be true, our glory, but the glory of God, God reaching His own glory. And it is here made so clear that it is along the line of sonship. Ultimately, it is the manifestation of the sons of God which issues in the reign of eternal glory, which brings in the fulness of God's glory in the church by Christ Jesus. That is what it is all unto - God's glory manifested universally in sons.

A Foretaste of Glory Now

And may I say here, lest it should seem to you to be too remote as belonging to something called the ages of the ages lying in the future, that it is not all that. If that is to be the ultimate and consummate issue of all God's purpose, there should be foreshadowings of it and foretastings of it now. In the separate, individual, partial experiences of trial and adversity, there should be an issue of the glory of God. We should be knowing that now. It has been so. Again and again, countless times, the people of God have felt that the situation in which they were placed was utterly impossible of having any glory. It may have been long-drawn-out, but eventually they have been able to see the glory of God in the situation and magnify the Lord. Do you think that the Lord wants all His glory stored up to some future? Surely not! The Church exists now, and although the fulness of His glory will be then, He would manifest that glory as a foretaste and a foreshadowing even now.

Of course, a great deal depends upon our mental conception of glory, but if I just put it like this, in an expression, a spontaneous heart expression of 'Praise the Lord!' that is glory. If after a bad time, a difficult time, an impossible time 'Praise the Lord'' can come from our hearts, that is glory, and that is the glory of God. And, believe me, that is how it will be in the great, vast concourse of the redeemed at last who have known what it is to go through great tribulations. They will together with one heart and one voice be saying, 'Praise the Lord!' and that will be His glory.

We have said that the all-encircling purpose is sons for His glory, beginning with God's eternal Son known to us as Jesus Christ our Lord, who was appointed, we are told, Heir of all things (Heb. 1:2). God ever had Him in view, and has ever kept Him in view as His Son, the destined heir of the universe, the heir of all things. And then passing from the Son to a people in Christ, encircled by Christ, as co-heirs; according to our reading - "joint-heirs with Christ", co-heirs with Him.

The Appointment of the Son as Heir

This inheritance of the Son and the sons is said to be the Divine motive and object in creation. Let us read one or two passages at this point, going back to the book of Job chapter 38. Remember that before we reach this point in the book of Job, Job had laboured hard to vindicate himself and to overpower his opponents by declaring that he also had wisdom and knowledge and understanding, but at last the Lord comes to Job and says: "Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto Me" (Job 38:3). 'Let us know all about this wonderful wisdom and knowledge that you have claimed to have.' And then to the end you notice it is a long series of interrogations which put Job completely out of court and make it very clear to him that he does not know anything at all. But the point is this - "Job, do you know about My eternal counsels, for it is in the realm of My eternal counsels that true wisdom and knowledge are found. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding... When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38:4,7) What do you know about that? Tell Me, what do you know about that?"

Leave that for a minute and come to the New Testament. Let us get right to the end, the book of the Revelation. "Worthy art Thou, our Lord and our God, to receive the glory and the honour and the power: for Thou didst create all things, and because of Thy will they were, and were created" (Rev. 4:11). "And they sing a new song, saying, Worthy art Thou to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for Thou wast slain, and didst purchase unto God with Thy blood men of every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation, and madest them to be unto our God a kingdom and priests; and they reign upon the earth. And I saw, and I heard a voice of many angels round about the throne and the living creatures and the elders; and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands; saying with a great voice, Worthy is the Lamb that hath been slain to receive the power, and riches, and wisdom, and might, and honour, and glory, and blessing. And every created thing which is in the heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and on the sea, and all things that are in them, heard I saying, Unto Him that sitteth on the throne, and unto the Lamb, be the blessing, and the honour, and the glory, and the dominion, for every and ever" (Rev. 5:9-13).

You will note that those passages have to do with creation. A question arises which is of considerable interest and significance as to that passage in Job. "When I laid the foundations of the earth... the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." Leaving out, of course, now all those questions which have arisen as to who the sons of God were, the question is this - what was happening? What was the occasion? The statement is that the morning stars sang together. I do not think that means the literal stars in the heavens. According to Scripture everywhere, stars are intelligences, they are heavenly bodies, persons of considerable eminence and power, and they come alongside of the sons of God. When the foundations of the earth were laid - that is the point - all these heavenly, celestial intelligences, sang together and shouted for joy. What was happening? What was it all about? The question with me is: was that a celebration of what we have in Hebrews 1:2: "Whom He appointed heir of all things"? When did He appoint His Son heir of all things? Is this the clue - when He laid the foundations of the earth - for in Colossians 1 we read that through Him, by Him and unto Him were all things created, things in heaven, things in earth.

When the foundations of the earth were laid, was there a celebration of the appointment of the Son as heir of all things? Was that the introduction of this great Divine conception of sonship, that along that line of sonship ultimately this great universe which was being brought into being should be filled with the glory of God? I do not answer the question dogmatically and say that it was, but it seems to me that it might well have been. All the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy - a mighty, heavenly celebration of the appointment of God's Son as heir of all things, and I think before we are through these messages, we shall see that that has a good deal to bear it out.

We leave it for the moment, but you see the point. Right back there, as far back as that, when Christ was chosen and appointed heir of all things, we were foreordained unto adoption as sons by Jesus Christ unto the praise of His glory. They sang, they shouted, and we were foreordained unto His praise, the praise of His glory. Wonderful outlook, is it not? Is that not an adequate setting for everything? But that is where it begins, this great intention of God.

God's Reaction to His Arrested Purpose

But then there comes the arrested purpose, that interlude and parenthesis, which is summed up in those verses which we read from Romans 8. Adam, the representative of God in this creation, handing over the inheritance to an enemy, and all that followed that: the glory veiled, the glory withdrawn, the glory made impossible on that line and on that ground, and yet the glory reserved. We have that great period from Adam to Christ, but God through that very period acting and reacting to the situation, while "the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope". Glory reserved, but subjected to vanity so that a creation with sin in it and evil in it and the devil in it should never reach glory. The Lord began a line along which He was going to reach His end, and we have a long series of individuals who touched the glory, or who were touched by the glory, and if you look closely and carefully into their lives in relation to God, you will see that they were heirs of the kingdom, heirs of the glory, and were being dealt with on the principles of sonship. That covers a lot. Abel was being dealt with as an heir of the glory on the principles of sonship. So with Noah. So with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph. The individuals were marked down in relation to this glorious end, and were dealt with, as the apostle puts it in the letter to the Hebrews, as sons (Heb. 12:7). We are dealt with as with sons. We shall see what that means later.

Then from the individuals we come to the nation for the inheritance, a nation for God's inheritance, for God's glory, chosen from among the nations, that He should be glorified in them. How often the Lord spoke of Israel as His peculiar treasure. Looked at naturally, you would not say that of them any more than you would of the rest of us. What value is there in us, what value was there in Israel naturally? Why should the Lord speak of Israel as His peculiar treasure, something tremendously precious to Him? Just for this reason: that in their case, as in ours, there was the very best ground provided for getting glory to Himself, and He will never get that if there is glory in the thing itself. The nation - but how that nation was dealt with again on the principles of sonship - "I called My son out of Egypt" (Hosea 11:1). "Let My son go" (Ex. 4:23), said the Lord to Pharaoh, and He was dealing with them on these spiritual principles of sonship, that He should eventually and progressively be glorified.

And then we come in the Old Testament to a large section of prediction, that which is pointing on all the time beyond the present to the future, the prediction of another coming One, a Son, prediction of another coming elect on this same principle, and then Christ Himself comes, the Son, the Heir. And does not that dark world recognise very clearly that He is the heir? We have often pointed out that there was a knowledge, an intelligence, a spiritual perception lying behind that parable or story told by the Lord against the opposers of Himself as God's Son, those who would not have Him as the Son of God and those who would not have Him as the heir. He told the story of a man who had a vineyard and let it out unto husbandmen, and went away. At the time when things should have been forthcoming, he sent his servant, and they stoned him, cast him out, and he sent another and they treated him badly and stoned him. At last he said, 'I have one son, I will send him'. And God sent His Son, and what did they say? They saw Him and they said, "This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance shall be ours" (Mark 12:7). Oh, the Lord Jesus knew what He was talking about! He was talking right through men to this sinister power which actuated them, and knew Him to be the Heir, the Son, and provoked them to kill Him with a view to taking the inheritance. You see, the inheritance is bound up with Him, the Son.

And then, when He has redeemed it and secured it, He brings in His church (as individuals) to be His co-heirs. "As many as received Him, to them gave He the right to become children of God" (John 1:12). Paul adds to that: "If children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ" (Rom. 8:17). "The Spirit Himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of God" (Rom. 8:16). "Foreordained... unto adoption as sons". And then collectively a family of children, and "Now unto Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus unto all generations for ever and ever." Do you catch some glimpse of what God is after?

An Adequate Conception of the Christian Life

What is your conception of the Christian life? Have you got an adequate setting for being the Lord's? Thank God that we are saved. It is a good thing to be saved from hell, from judgement, doom, and the guilt and penalty of sin. It is a good thing to be assured that one day we will go to heaven, whatever that is and wherever that is. No one seems to be able to define what they mean when they say they are going to heaven. However, it is a good thing to have that assurance, and other things that accompany it. But is that adequate? It is good, but it is not the setting of the Christian life given to us in the Word of God. Those are only things which go towards the main thing. You will not get through your trials, afflictions, sufferings and adversities unless you have an adequate explanation of them, and God has given that.

Oh, how wonderfully full is His unveiling in His word, of the meaning of it all! How great it is to be a child of God, called unto His eternal glory, that God, the God of glory, should manifest His glory in you and me eventually, and is working on that line now, dealing with us as with sons. It is no small thing. I say again, have you got an adequate conception of what it means to be a Christian?

We have very rebellious hearts, we have a very difficult nature, and I think I have that more than most people. The capabilities of this heart are very great and very terrible, and under threats, suffering, affliction and adversity and in the great problems which arise in the Christian life, again and again the question has presented itself - is it worth it? Is there a sufficient justification for the Lord to deal with us in this way? Why should the Lord allow this and that to come into our lives, to form part of our brief sojourn here? We want a very big answer to that "Why?" because the situations are to us very big. They are very real and sometimes very terrible, and if we have not got a big enough answer, I am afraid we might throw our salvation to the winds. Forgive me for saying that if it is wrong.

We might feel we just cannot go on, we must give it all up unless there is something that makes it worthwhile and justifies these afflictions, and that is why I have always tried to impress upon you the immensity of the background in which we are set as the people of God. It is no little salvation, no little Lord. No, we demand something tremendous as the justification of this way, and here it is: "Foreordained unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto Himself" - that is the beginning. And the end - "Unto Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus unto all generations forever and ever." Is that enough? God breaking forth in this universe in all His glory by way of us, by way of sons, and that being the signal for the release and deliverance of the whole creation from that ban. For the creation is under a ban of vanity, never getting through, striving, groaning, travailing, but nothing coming of it, just failing at last, and the removal of that, the breaking out of the whole creation into glory where nothing fades, dies, falls, perishes or sees corruption, where death, shadows and fears are no more, but everything is eternally alive. The signal for that is when God has got His sons in company, complete, waiting for our redemption, our adoption. The whole creation hangs upon you and me. The whole creation, for God's vindication, waits upon the result and the issue of God's dealings with you and with me, among many others. A tremendous thing is hanging upon this. And if you say that is too big, too high, bring it down to simple every day application, and you know it is true.

God takes you in hand over something. God brings you into trial, difficulty, suffering and adversity. You go through a dark and difficult time. Now then, there are two ways: you can revolt, you can rebel, you can become bitter, you can turn in your spirit, in your heart against the Lord, and become stubborn, recalcitrant. Have you ever done that? Is there any glory down that way? You know that is the way of darkness and death, and if you have done that a few times you have learned not to do it so quickly next time. You say, 'I have been down that street before; I know where that leads.' Take the other course. 'Lord, this is a bitterly difficult time and situation, the whole condition of things is so contrary to what I expected, I in myself am disappointed and this is a terrible thing, but Lord You know what You are doing, and You are going to bring glory out of this...'. If we really get through that, what happens? It is glory at once, and we can say:

"Heaven above is softer blue,

Earth around is sweeter green;

Something lives in every hue,

Christless eyes have never seen."

Somehow or other, the world seems a different place when you get through with God on a situation, and it is glory, it is a foretaste, maybe small, but it is there. It works down to periodic experiences, but take the cumulative, the whole, bring out all the sufferings of all the people of God through all the ages; how great the glory must be and what an emancipation of this universe! Paul says that is how it will be after God gets His sons, and they are manifested. At present they are hidden, they are in secret, no one knows them, they only know one another in spirit. "The world knoweth us not" says John "because it knew Him not" (1 John 3:1). They are hidden, but God is dealing with us in this hidden way, in this deep and secret way. The Spirit of sonship is working in us developing sonship by trial and adversity. It is going on in the great multitude, ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands, and then the signal, the time has come, the moment has struck for the manifestation of those sons, and with that manifestation the creation itself is delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glory of the children of God.

The Lord help us by this word for the time being, giving us some little glimpse of the great horizon of God in which we and His people are set.

Chapter 2 - David an Illustration of the Meaning of Sonship

"And Jesus, when He was baptised, went up straightway from the water: and lo, the heavens were opened unto Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove, and coming upon Him; and lo, a voice out of the heavens, saying, This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matt. 3:16-17).

"...That it might be fulfilled which was spoken through Isaiah the prophet, saying, Behold, My Servant whom I have chosen; My Beloved in whom My soul is well pleased: I will put My Spirit upon Him" (Matt. 12:17-18).

"...To the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved" (Eph. 1:6).

"Put on therefore, as God's elect, holy and beloved, a heart of compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, longsuffering" (Col. 3:12).

We are occupied with God's inheritance of glory in sons. We read in the previous chapter passages of Scripture relevant to that. You will have noticed that the verse preceding Ephesians 1:6 indicates that He "foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto Himself... to the praise of the glory of His grace". And then immediately it goes on to speak of our acceptance in the Beloved, which means our acceptance in Christ, the beloved Son. So it is that the universe is horizoned by this one object. God has, so to speak, thrown around this universe a horizon, and that horizon is His glory in sonship. We are going to seek to get nearer to that, taking a further step inward at this time.

We turn to the book of the Revelation to help us in this movement. You know that this book of the Revelation is pre-eminently wonderful for one reason, that it gathers into itself the whole Bible. It is not a very great book so far as pages are concerned, but it is a very great book in the sense that it has, within its quite brief compass, the whole Bible. It is the book of inclusion. The Old Testament is referred to definitely some twenty-eight times in this little pamphlet, but that does not convey everything. If you were to look at those twenty-eight references, you would find that each one of them represented a very great deal of the Old Testament. Then, it is the book of conclusion, that is, that while it gathers up into itself the whole of the Old Testament, it brings all that has gone before to a conclusion. It is the book of consummation. This is the end of all that that has been, and this is how it works out. And then it is the book of realisation. Here we have spiritual and literal fulfilment of all that has gone before.

I wonder if you have noticed that the last lines of that book gather the Old Testament together in a very remarkable way? In verse 19 we read the summing-up words of everything: "If any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the tree of life...". That links the end with the beginning. Here the closing words of the Bible link on with the book of Genesis right at the beginning: "the tree of life". And then again in verse 16, the second part of the verse: "I am the root and the offspring of David." That takes us right into the centre of the Old Testament and throws back from that to all that had gone before, and leads on to all that follows.

"The Root and Offspring of David"

This is a remarkable statement, and it is a very significant word. "I am the root and the offspring of David." It is remarkable that it should be almost the final statement of the Bible. What does it mean? Well, "I am the root of David" means that all that David signifies and implies comes from Christ. David derives his significance, his value, his meaning, his everything, from Christ. Christ is his root. Well then, Christ must go a long way back if He is the root of David. All that led up to David came from Christ. That means Christ is God's eternal Son.

"The offspring of David" means that Christ takes up into Himself all that David ever signified and inherits all that David represented, and that is no small thing. Christ is David's inheritance. David is Christ's inheritance. Those words in Luke 1:32: "The Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of His father David." Those words get very near to this matter in the last chapter of the Revelation. David has a large place in the New Testament, for he is referred to by name in the New Testament no fewer than forty-seven times, but then in addition to that there are all the quotations from David, from his Psalms, in the New Testament. And if again you look at all those references to David in the New Testament, you will find that they contain in themselves a very great deal indeed.

The statements about David in the New Testament are tremendous, sometimes breathtaking. So we must look to see what David is, in order to get to this matter of God's inheritance of glory in sons. That necessitates the reading of some other passages, and it is all about David: "Which also our fathers, in their turn, brought in with Joshua when they entered on the possession of the nations, that God thrust out before the face of our fathers, unto the days of David; who found favour in the sight of God, and asked to find a habitation for the God of Jacob" (Acts 7:45-46). "When He had removed him (that is, Saul the son of Kish), He raised up David to be their king; to whom also He bare witness and said, I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after My heart, who shall do all My will" (Acts 13:22). "Then thou spakest in vision to thy saints, And saidst, I have laid help upon one that is mighty; I have exalted one chosen out of the people. I have found David My servant; with My holy oil have I anointed him: with whom My hand shall be established; Mine arm also shall strengthen him. The enemy shall not exact from him, nor the son of wickedness afflict him" ... "It shall be established for ever as the moon, and as the faithful witness in the sky" (Ps 89:19-37).

David the Beloved

Now, what is the point? First of all, the meaning of his name. The name 'David' means 'Beloved'. "Who found favour in the sight of God", "a man after My heart". You can already hear something leading to, "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matt. 3:17); "...made us accepted in the Beloved" (Eph. 1:6 A.V.). David, by his very name, is a pointer to God's Son and by his very name links in with this matter of sonship where the glory of God is going to be found universally.

David the Anointed

But that is not the only link with Christ. Have you noticed that the first time that David's name is actually mentioned is in connection with the Holy Spirit coming upon him? "Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the midst of his brethren: and the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward" (1 Sam. 16:13). The first mention of his name is connected with the Spirit of God coming upon him. You notice that the first time that the Lord Jesus is called the Beloved was when the Holy Spirit came upon Him: "This is My beloved Son". "I have chosen David," said the Lord, "With My holy oil have I anointed him" (Ps. 89:20). The chosen and the anointed of God on the basis of sonship, and when that happens, destiny is settled, and what a destiny! Things are just bound to happen.

Everything Moves to David

Everything will most certainly move towards that one. Whoever may have drawn away and for a time held something other than on that Divine basis of sonship will have to let it go; they will just have to let it go. It will be taken from them and it will all move in a transition towards the one chosen and anointed of God. Do you see how that happened with David? Even in the day when he was chosen and anointed, Samuel was not disposed to think that David was the one. David's brothers came before Samuel, these men evidently of great stature and fine physique who were obviously men of war in the natural sense. As they passed before Samuel one by one, and he came to one more outstanding than all the others, he said in his heart, "Surely the Lord's anointed is before me" (1 Sam. 16:6). He was wholly disposed towards that one, and would have been disposed, I take it, towards any of the others before David. But the Lord said, 'This is not he.' "Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart." It seemed that all the brothers had passed before Samuel and he was left with a question. 'What is the meaning of this? I was told that it was in the house of Jesse that I should find the man of God's choice. The house of Jesse has passed before me, and the Lord will not let me do anything about any one of them.' And so he turned to Jesse, "Are here all thy children?" Jesse said, "Well, there is another one, I did not think it worth bringing him, he is the youngest, he is looking after the sheep. We thought that any of these would come before him...". Samuel said, "Send and fetch him; for we will not sit down till he come hither." When David came, the Lord said, "Arise, anoint him; for this is he", and Samuel had to make a transition from all others to David. He was God's chosen and in heaven he was God's anointed, and everything had to move to him.

And from Samuel onward this course of transition took place in all directions. Presently some men of Israel will join David. Movement will begin, movement towards David. Sooner or later his own brothers had to join David. They were clearly not favourable to him, indeed they were very angry with him and had no place for him. They said, "What have you done with those few sheep? You go back and look after them. Your place is there, not here" (1 Sam. 17:28). There had to be this transition to David. I am not going to point you to the Scriptures, but there is one Scripture which definitely says that one of the brothers of David was mentioned in connection with David's wars.

And then it was almost like a landslide. All Israel began to turn from Saul to David, and although Saul himself was David's greatest enemy, and most bitterly against him, he was compelled to utter the words that David was God's anointed. "I know that thou shalt surely be king" (1 Sam. 24:20), said Saul. Here is everything in transition, moving towards David, the beloved of God.

Do I need to follow that through with the still greater Beloved, the Anointed, the Chosen and the anointed of God, His dearly-beloved Son? You just cannot stop it. There is a movement in heaven towards Jesus Christ, God's Son. God has fixed the destiny of this universe in Him. God has determined to have all glory in His creation in Christ, and it has just got to be. Men have done everything in their power to stop the dry rot of their kingdom, but what happens? The more they persecute, the more they grow. The more they stand in the way, the more God goes on in spite of them. The Lord Jesus was forsaken, smitten, buffeted, spat upon, mocked. They cried: "Away with Him, crucify Him." They ushered Him by sheer force to the cross and pierced Him. That is one side of the story. But He was God's anointed, and that is the other side, and so today there are countless numbers who have been with Him through the generations, waiting for the day. They have gone from this earth. There is a great multitude on the earth, and we trust there will be many more added day by day, but it is a tremendous transition. And if we want any argument at all, we have only got to look at history in relation to Christ, any argument that in the end God is going to get glory to Himself through His Son.

But let us come back to David. Saul and all with him were in a carnal condition when David was anointed. We know the meaning of Saul: man's idea of rulership, of kingship; man's choice, something in which man glories, of which man boasts, the natural man, and all Israel was in a very carnal state, for Samuel said to the Lord, "They have asked them a king like the nations". And if we want anything more utter concerning their carnality, it is the reply of the Lord: "They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected Me" (1 Sam 8:7). That is the state of things. Saul then, and all with him, represent the carnal man in relation to Divine things, with a hand upon the things of God. David is a man of the Spirit, the spiritual man, who is the rightful heir to the things of God. One takes possession for himself and his own glory and satisfaction. That is Saul. David came into possession for the glory of God, and that is the key to David's life. You may have a lot of things against David. You may ask a lot of questions about David. There are those black spots in his life. You may wonder why God committed Himself to David as He did, why God made so much of David in view of those things. The answer is that David had a heart for God and "the Lord looketh on the heart", and God can do wonderful things when it is like that. That is only another way of saying 'a man of the Spirit', for a man of the Spirit has heart for nothing else and no one else but God, and certainly not for himself.

David's Separation from Saul and His House

But note, this transition and this ascendancy of David ran along parallel with David's separation from Saul and his house. That separation did not take place all at once. It had a quiet beginning and it was very gradual, but it was very sure. This is a very important and significant thing to note, this movement which began in David's life away from the house of Saul. It seemed slow, but you can see it taking on strength, becoming more and more defined until the complete break with the house of Saul was made, and God attested David by this transition. One thing after another falling to David ran parallel to that separation from the house of Saul. The more David became separated from the house of Saul, the more the Lord attested him, the more the Lord added to him. Have you noticed that in the life of David? When the last break came, then David came into his full position.

The house of Saul, as we have said, is carnality. It is the flesh, it is the natural man touching and handling the things of God. Oh, no, it is not the world, it is not the unsaved, it is the people of God, but the people of God in a worldly position, a worldly state, the people of God who are keeping up the religion, but it is just form and not of the Spirit. They are maintaining a certain form of things, the tradition, the history, but they are not in harmony with it by the anointing. There is all the difference between a Christianity that is traditional, historical and institutional, and a Christianity that is anointed with the Holy Spirit. You know the difference, I am sure, between those two things. You can meet people who can say they are Christians. You say, "Are you a Christian?" "Yes, I am a Christian, do you think I am a heathen?" But you do not meet the Lord. You have no sense that they know the Lord, you do not realise that the greatest thing about a Christian is that here is one in whom the Lord is. You meet the Spirit of Christ here, the Spirit of Life, the Spirit of Light, the Spirit of Love and the Spirit of Power. Yes, and you can go further and be very religious in your form, your going to church, and your taking Holy Communion and your going through certain other rites, yes, all that in a very devout way. There was something of that in Israel in the days of Saul, and yet the anointing was not there, the Spirit of God was not there, the Lord was not there; He had left it and He had left Saul. Now David must leave it, and only as David does leave it and stands clear of that carnal state will the Lord work out this destiny and cause things to pass to him.

Do you notice something like that happened with the church at the beginning? In the beginning, in the first days of the church's history as we have it in the book of the Acts, we do not find an instant and complete break with the old tradition. Some were still clinging to the temple and to some of the feasts and the rites of Judaism. It was not until, by slow and gradual movement, at last that they took spiritual ground and repudiated Judaism as such, historical, traditional and institutional religion as such, and took the ground of Christ wholly, that the Lord set His full seal on them. You can see the movement from Jerusalem, from Judaism, from the old ceremonies; the movement to Christ. The letter to the Hebrews is the great document of that transition.

Now, you see with David there had to be separation from that in which Satan had a footing, and that was religion. An evil spirit came upon Saul, that is the devil, a foothold of Satan in that system. The Spirit of the Lord came upon David and David had to come out where the Spirit of the Lord was in utterness. And as that went on gradually and steadily, but most surely, things moved to David, and he was shown to be God's beloved, God's chosen.

David's History Repeated in Every Son

Now these are things inseparable from God's glorious inheritance in sons. There must be first of all a recognition of our election. The apostle makes so much of that, telling us that we were elect, we were chosen in Christ. There must be a recognition of this and an acknowledgment and acceptance of it, that we are the Lord's by His own sovereign act of choice, and of coming into line with that. The Lord is our owner. He has chosen - oh, mystery of mysteries that He should have done it, but there it is - He has chosen. That is an essential thing, in the long run, to His glorious inheritance.

Anointed: the Holy Spirit, when He got hold of men in New Testament times made them exceedingly particular about this matter. When people turned and professed to have come to Christ, and were said to have believed, these Holy Spirit filled and governed men would not just accept it as report. Neither would they accept it as just an attitude or a statement of the people concerned. They went where it happened to make sure, by taking care that these people did really, in an act, receive the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit knew what He was doing. His great inheritance, God's great inheritance of glory, is only in anointed people, those who have received the Spirit of God, and you may be a professing believer and say you are that, but the question is, 'Have you received the Holy Spirit?' Paul was meticulous about that. When he came to Ephesus and found certain disciples, he said, "Did ye receive the Holy Spirit when ye believed?" (Acts 19:2). Now, this is not just some doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The whole destiny of the church hangs upon this, and the whole inheritance of God in glory hangs upon it, whether you and I are spiritual people, made so by having been born of the Holy Spirit and having received the Holy Spirit. Just settle it here that as a child of God called to sonship, you must be in the position to say, 'I know I have received the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is in me.' It is your birthright, and it is God's right to His inheritance in you.

And then separation from all that in which Satan has a footing. That is essential to the ultimate glory, and the glory of God will be progressive according to our separation from all that is carnal, sensual, and, as the apostle adds, devilish or demonised. Now, immediately after David was anointed, what happened? He had to meet the devil. He was anointed. Now there is a history going on in the unseen. This is not all written in the record of David's life, but there is something going on and you can see the spiritual movement as from behind. David is anointed. The evil spirit has come to Saul. Those two are going to be brought together before long with a clash. On the one side, Saul, possessed and governed by this demon, this devil, marks down David. Presently he will try to kill him with his javelin. The battle is set. That very anointing has precipitated this. It is a part of the anointing. It is the issue of the anointing. The beloved is on the field, the beloved of God. Immediately after Jesus received the Spirit and the attestation - "This is My beloved Son" - He was led into the wilderness with the devil. The battle is joined, the conflict in the unseen has started, because of the anointing.

The Antagonism of Satan

And from Saul it will move out to Goliath. That anointing will meet that full development of antagonism to God as represented by Goliath, for he was a representative and an inclusive one. All the enemies of the Lord were summed up in Goliath. Kill Goliath, and the Philistines will flee. While Goliath remains alive, then Israel is in terror and paralysis rests upon the hosts of the Lord. This anointed one must move out, and by the anointing he moved out against Goliath.

But my point is this - here is the parallelism between David and Christ, the two Beloveds. By that very election and anointing, Christ moves out to the kingdom of Satan. Perhaps we ought to take more note of this and more comfort from it. We never do. We always feel bad, we always have a little grumble about it that, when there is something to be obtained in relation to God's inheritance of glory, some more glory for the Lord, then the conflict gets going. We know it, we notice it. Something is to be obtained and we know it very largely because of the activity of evil powers. In all sorts of ways the battle is on. Oh, if only we could and would, that is a very good sign. There is something coming to the glory of God. God is going to come into His inheritance, and we are brought into the battle of this ultimate thing - God's glory in sonship.

You see, Satan then recognised what was involved with David, and he certainly all the more recognised what was involved in Christ, and he recognises what is involved in the church - nothing less than his own kingdom, his whole system, his whole place, his whole power. That is involved where the anointing is and where, by the anointing, God's glory is the issue. Yes, Satan knew all about David and what he represented, what he signified, how far-reaching he was. Satan knew all about it, and that dear man David had to go through it, to fight for the thing that was in his heart - the glory of God. And you must remember, however much you condemn David for certain things in his life, however badly we may feel about those things, and however sorry and grieved and perplexed, we must remember that the more a man stands for the glory of God, the more he is the target of the devil. There is a concentration of evil forces upon those who stand for this great issue of God's inheritance, to catch them, to trip them up and to break them down, which other people know little of. Always remember that with David. He may have been weak and faulty, but that was not all. Hells combined to shatter that man if possible, and take advantage of his weak moments, as those evil powers always do.

The Snare of Satan

And sometimes the snare. Saul sought to get a footing with David in his kingdom by his daughter Michal. He offered his daughter Michal in marriage to the man who slew that giant. See that snare. You follow through the history of Michal and see what a snare, what a thorn in David's side she was, and how in the end the Lord had to bring a curse upon Michal. She was the very instrument of Satan in David's life to ensnare, and if the devil cannot get by open and loathesome means, he will do it by subtlety and subterfuges.

So he comes to the greater Beloved, and says, showing Him all the kingdoms of the world, "All these things will I give Thee, if Thou wilt fall down and worship me" (Matt. 4:9). His aim was to get a foothold for his kingdom in the Beloved. He is always doing that sort of thing. In some way he will try to circumvent this great issue of God's glory.

We will go on perhaps later. David - a great son, his name is Beloved - Christ taking up all that David signifies as a still greater Beloved, all that David signifies taken up in Christ, the offspring of David, and then the church brought in, accepted in the Beloved One and called the beloved of God. It is a wonderful thing that that name, that designation resting upon David and then upon Christ, should pass to us, but it is not just a term of endearment, a pretty phrase - "beloved of God", "beloved of the Lord", "dearly beloved". It is something of immense significance. It implies nothing less than that it is with the beloved of the Lord that God's inheritance of glory rests, by these beloved sons in the Beloved Son, God is having His heritage of glory.

Yes, we come back to the beginning. The universe is horizoned and circled by this One, that the glory of God is ultimately manifested universally through sonship. It means what we have been saying. David is a great illustration of the meaning of sonship, both as to its demands and as to its experiences. We have not touched David's life, we have only just begun. What a history David had for this reason: that the glory of God was so much bound up with him. Oh, look again, yes, we are going to look again at David and see what glory came to God through that man, and then you see, well, that is the thing bound up with sonship, standing in the position of the beloved. But look what is required: this recognition of the sovereign choice of God, this absolute essential of the anointing of the Holy Spirit, this necessity for a gradual inward separation from the old natural life until it is final. And as to experience: rejected, cast out, embattled, frustrated, persecuted, pursued, cast down and much more, all in the way of the glorious inheritance of God. And David, after all, is only a faint shadow of the greater Son, the Lord Jesus, who knew more of that sort of thing than David did, but who gave God the uttermost separation unto His will. Of David the Lord said "who shall do all My will". Ah, but David's doing of the will of God was a small thing compared with the way the Lord Jesus did it, "Obedient unto death, yea, the death of the cross" (Phil. 2:8).

Chapter 3 - David and the Principles of Sonship

Reading: Ephesians 1:5-12

God's glory ultimately displayed and manifested in sons - that is what is before us - God's heritage of glory in sons. God has a great heritage; that heritage He has vested in a people; that people, by His foreordaining, stand related to Him as sons in His Son Jesus Christ. From that comprehensive horizon of God's intention, we seek to see something of the meaning of how God reaches that end and what, therefore, sonship means.

In the previous chapter we were occupied with David. In this connection David's name means "beloved, chosen, anointed, attested by God", pointing on to a greater than David, God's own beloved Son.

David's Life and History Realised in His Son Solomon

Now we shall continue in that connection, and I have only to remind you that the whole life and history of David was realised in his son Solomon. There came a point at which this whole matter of sonship arose in a very definite and precise way with David in relation to Solomon, and David's whole life passed over to Solomon and had its fulfilment in Solomon. Solomon is the proverbial figure in the whole Bible for glory. He is the synonym of glory, magnificence, wealth, majesty, fulness, everything that speaks of what is consummate. But Solomon does not stand by himself. Solomon, after all, is only the fulfilment of David's whole life.

Solomon's heritage was the heritage of his father David. The Lord Jesus, when He was here on earth speaking of Solomon's greatness, Solomon's glory, Solomon's wisdom, said, "A greater than Solomon is here" (Matt. 12:42). So Solomon represents three things: sonship, glory, and Christ. In those two things he foreshadows Christ, but is only a shadow. A shadow passes, Christ remains. A shadow reflects, Christ is that which is reflected. A shadow is something quite intangible. Christ is very tangible. But David has a lot to say to us yet on this matter of sonship and glory and what sonship means. We now take another fragment this evening, because David was the embodiment of a very great deal himself.

David Halfway Between Abraham and Christ

"The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham... So all the generations from Abraham unto David are fourteen generations; and from David unto the carrying away to Babylon fourteen generations; and from the carrying away to Babylon unto the Christ fourteen generations" (Matt. 1:1-17). So David stands halfway between Abraham and Christ and is a terminal point in that long history; that is, he takes up into himself everything from Abraham and passes it all on to Christ. It is a tremendous sweep. And genealogies end with Christ. There is no one after him. He is the sum of all, the end of all. All that history comes to its climax and its consummation in Christ. But, as we said, David stands halfway, and David looks back, gathers up all the life and the history of the chosen people and becomes the embodiment of all that history, and then hands it on to another in terms of sonship. That Other, the greater Son of David, Jesus Christ, takes up all that David had taken up and includes it and transcends it.

Principles of Sonship in David

What is that "all"? That "all" which finds its terminal point, its climax in David is the principles of sonship. If the climax is David in Solomon, that is the climax in sonship, for that is the great thing that comes in with Solomon. I do not want to anticipate what will be said more fully later, but those of you who know your Bibles know that the one word which seems to cover Solomon altogether where David is concerned is this word 'son'. "Thy son which shall come after thee", and so on. And you know very well too from the New Testament that Solomon was a figure of Christ. The very language which seemed to be addressed to David about Solomon is taken up in the New Testament in the book of the Acts and applied to Christ, seeming to say, 'Yes, that was all right for Solomon, in a way, but it really did not apply to him wholly and fully. It applied to another, a transcendent Solomon, the Son of all sons, above all sons.' You know that quite well, that is simple Bible knowledge.

But if David's climax is in sonship and therefore in glory, and in glory and therefore in sonship, we want to see what sonship means as a cumulative thing, because it is the heritage of the past. What has been going on since Abraham, under the hand of God, has been the working out of the principles and the development of sonship. Solomon does not just come in and begin and end the thing. Solomon comes in as the crown of a whole course, and we want to see that course, and we can do that very quickly and quite briefly.

Abraham - Election

Back to Abraham. What does Abraham signify in this connection? Well, things begin with Abraham in a new way. God made a new beginning where Abraham was concerned, in relation to this elect race, this chosen people, the seed of Abraham, and Abraham comes to us as setting forth this election, this Divine choosing and calling and establishing upon covenant. Abraham was away out there beyond, and God, so to speak, went out there beyond, chose him and called him and made a covenant with him. He is called Abraham the Hebrew. The 'Hebrew' means 'the man from beyond'. So that God went out beyond to find, to choose, to call, and to bring on to covenant ground, and in Abraham his seed became the covenant people, the covenant nation. And sonship, as we were pointing out earlier, rests upon that: chosen, called and covenanted in Christ. "He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world" (Eph. 1:4), says the apostle. We were called according to His purpose, and we are established upon a covenant made in His precious blood. That is where sonship begins. It is a fairly firm foundation. It goes right out beyond to the beyond to find us, to bring us in, to call us by His grace, and to establish us in the incorruptible blood of the everlasting covenant. Sonship is founded in something very substantial and strong. That is where it begins.

Isaac - Death and Resurrection

The next figure is Isaac. The ground has been established, the ground of sonship, and then Isaac comes along, and we all know what Isaac represents - death and resurrection, that is, the bringing to an end of a natural life or a natural relationship in order to establish the relationship upon heavenly Divine ground to make it something permanent. Through death and resurrection the principle of heavenly permanence is secured. And if it is difficult for you to understand that way of putting it, let me try to simplify that by saying that this great purpose of God in His heritage in sons demands that you and I shall be entirely cut off from our natural and earthly connection and attached to heaven. That is the principle of the death and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus representatively. That is the meaning of our being crucified with Christ, buried with Him and raised together with Him - to be taken off of one ground and to be placed upon another - for that old ground can never be the ground of God's glory. God never gets any glory out of our old natural life, He gets nothing at all of a heritage in that realm, and He has closed it down. His heritage of glory is on other ground. We are so familiar with that; that is Isaac.

Jacob - Discipline Unto Sonship

Jacob follows. Get the man established on covenant ground, and then the man established on heavenly ground of incorruptible, indestructible life figuratively, and you have got that, yet you have not got to the end of all that sonship means. You really have only come to the beginning of the practical application. Jacob, the next link in the chain, sets forth the discipline unto sonship. In a peculiar way Jacob represents sonship because it is the twelve sons of Jacob who are the nucleus of Israel. Sonship is very much in view where Jacob is concerned. I speak of Jacob as a type, a figure. But what discipline unto sonship! What a hard school Jacob had to go into, and sonship does mean that. Perhaps you have no need to be told that. God has got hold of you, called you by His grace, called you with a heavenly calling, brought you into that living relationship with His heavenly Son, the ground of His risen life, and that is not the end. It is then that things begin to happen, we go into the hard school. God is dealing with us as with sons, and we are very ready to admit when we get into that school that there is a lot of Jacob that needs dealing with. Indeed, I do not think we really know how much Jacob there is in us until we get into the Lord's hands. There is a need for this discipline unto sonship.

Joseph - Suffering Unto Sonship

The next is Joseph. Joseph brings us into the presence of sonship through suffering, suffering unto glory. The difference between Jacob's discipline and Joseph's suffering is this, that Jacob's discipline, which was, of course, a good deal of suffering to him, was due to what was in him. Joseph's suffering was at the hands of his brethren, what came upon him from them because of the hatred of the enemy, because of envy.

Principles of Sonship Taken Up in Israel

Well, here you have these aspects of sonship. They are very clear. Now they are all taken up collectively in the nation Israel. Every one of those things is taken into the nation - covenant, election, calling. That passes into the nation collectively. The death and the resurrection becomes a very real thing, symbolically or typically, in the life of Israel. Yes, Jacob's sons went down into Egypt, and if that was not a living grave, what was? They had to be brought out as by a mighty act of resurrection, brought out of their grave. That is Isaac in the nation. Jacob - well, did they know nothing about discipline because of themselves, their own natural lives? Forty years they were disciplined, and at the end of forty years the verdict was: there is no glory in Jacob; all the glory will be in Israel, but that is a different kind. There is no glory in Jacob. You had better bury that. That was buried. But the discipline which brought an end to the Jacob brought a beginning to Israel, the son; Israel, prince with God. Joseph gathered into the nation, yes, Israel also knew quite a bit about the sufferings of Joseph in the midst of the nations, at the hands of the nations. Israel's history has been suffering at the hands of others, but brought eventually, ultimately, to glory. All these things which are principles and aspects of sonship were gathered from the several individuals into the one collective nation, and David inherits them all. He becomes the embodiment of all the past history and life of the chosen people of God, but it was not just that it came to him in an hereditary way.

Principles of Sonship in David

The next thing you notice is that David himself has to go through every one of those experiences, so that it is not just a traditional and historical heritage or inheritance; it becomes a very practical and personal one. It is tremendously impressive to see how much of David's own experience was the experience of the nation of which he was the crown. Some of his psalms take us right back over the history of the nation and they find expression through his own soul as though he himself was going through that, or had gone through that and knew all about it. The great thing about the Psalms of David (and we are going to be very much occupied with them before we are through this series) is that every one of them is an experience. He was not just a poet writing beautiful poems, he was a man writing or singing his experience. You can hear the echo of his own nation, of his own people and their history in so much that David writes and sings. Yes, he was the experimental or experiential embodiment of the history of the whole nation of which he was the sum.

But that was not all. We are not just talking about history in the Bible back there long ago. This comes right up to date, right up to ourselves, and we have in all that enunciated a law and that great law is this: the chosen vessel has to have in its own being all that for which it is chosen. God has no interest in theories. God has no interest in anything that is abstract. God makes things very definitely personal, a part of the very being of those who are called according thereto.

David - a Beginning

We have said that David is halfway between Abraham and Christ, a terminal point, not just an end, but also a beginning. He gathers into himself a lot that is yet future. You are familiar, I am sure, with all those expressions in the Psalms of David which have a Messianic nature and character, what we call the Messianic Psalms, the psalms which point to and speak of the Messiah, the coming Christ. There is a lot in David's Psalms which speaks of Christ, and yet, as you read the Psalms, it is so interwoven with David's life that you feel he must be speaking about himself, he must be going through an experience that makes it possible for him to say that, and he did not know at the time all that he meant, all that he was saying.

He went through an experience and gave expression to it, and centuries after, the very words that he used were applied to Christ. Oh, you know some of them! Psalm 22 opens with "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" and the following words show that David was passing through some experience like that. "I go mourning all the day long" (Ps. 38:6), and you know how those words were taken up by our Lord on the cross. "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken Me?" (Matt. 27:46). David went through something, because in sonship and glory this was the way of the great Son. "The fellowship of His sufferings" (Phil. 3:10). To use another phrase - "Cast off among the dead". Did not our Lord enter into something like that, as though He were cast off by God? What about Judas and his treachery? "For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it." "Mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, who did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me" (Ps. 55:12; 41:9). You can look through that window into that upper room, and see Judas, the familiar friend, sitting at the table of the Lord in treachery planning His betrayal. And so we could go on, but we should arrive at the last, for it was David who said, "Into Thy hand I commend my spirit" (Ps. 31:5), the last words of our Lord. Was he not in fellowship with Christ in his life, in his experience? Was he not learning in the depths of his soul the meaning of sonship? Did not all this issue in Solomon, the glorious kingdom, the glorious king? I am sure you see the point.

But it did not stay there. In the New Testament you have on several occasions a quotation from David beyond the Cross. I will not turn to those passages in the book of the Acts which refer to this, but I just remind you of one. "The stone which the builders rejected, the same was made the head of the corner" (Luke 20:17, Ps. 118:22). "This was the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes" (Mark 12:11). The temple rises, the heavenly spiritual house. Peter quoted that in connection with the house of living stones. Yes, that is quoted a few times beyond the Cross. He is the "chief corner stone" says Paul (Eph. 2:20). "The stone which the builders rejected, the same was made the head of the corner. This is the Lord's doing; it is marvellous in our eyes." How does that begin? "This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it." Of course, traditionally Christianity attaches that to Sunday - nothing of the kind - "This is the day!" Christ has triumphed through His cross, in His resurrection, and is in the throne of His Father - "This is the day which the Lord hath made." "The stone which the builders rejected was made the head of the corner. This is the Lord's doing; it is marvellous in our eyes." David went through something like that.

Was he not, in so far as Israel was concerned, in his time the chief corner-stone? Was he not rejected? Was he not pursued out of his very country? Was he not despised, set at nought? God brought him to be the head of the corner for his time, for his generation, and in a limited form he passed through the experience which Christ passed through in an unlimited form. He came to the same glorious issue, and that is all contained in this so familiar phrase - "Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus unto all generations for ever and ever" (Eph. 3:20-21). That is the heritage of David taken up in Christ and transcended just as far as the heaven is above the earth, just as far as the eternal is beyond the temporal, just as far as the spiritual is more than the natural. Christ has transcended David, the Beloved of all the Beloveds.

"Accepted in the Beloved"

Then we are "accepted in the beloved" (Eph. 1:6. A.V.), we are made a heritage, "according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace" (Eph. 1:5-6). It is all such a wonderful network. No one but the infinite God could have written the Bible. It all works in so marvellously. Called, foreordained unto the adoption of sons by Jesus Christ unto Himself to the end that we should be to the praise of His glory, and that end sees all this that is related to sonship carried out and fulfilled. You and I are in the school of sonship now, in the fellowship of His sufferings, tasting of His cup, knowing the way that He went in ourselves.

The Explanation of God's Dealings With Us

If I should re-emphasize anything at all as I close, it would be this: the Lord is not just wanting to have saved people. He wants to have saved people, but He does not just want to have a lot of busy, saved people doing a lot of things for Him, and perhaps doing His work. Above all, over all and through all, working or not being able to work for the Lord, in all and through all He is developing this body of sons for the display of His eternal glory, and that is the explanation of His dealings with us.

You have a thousand "whys" as to the way of the Lord with you, as to the dealings of the Lord with you, as to the bitterness out of which you might even cry "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me", out of that darkness from which you groan "cast off among the dead". If there is anything like that, it is the way of sonship to the glory, to God's heritage. Do believe it. If you could lay hold of that, you would get through more easily, you will have something upon which to get through. Do not think that it is all judgement. Do not think that all discipline is condemnation and that God is against you. That is always the twist that the enemy gives to the hard experiences under the hand of God, for he is the evil maligner of God.

Whether your sufferings are the result of your faults and your failures and therefore are used by God for your discipline, instruction, training and warning, God is the God of purpose and the God of glory. And out of even your blunders and your mistakes, yes, and your sins, if your heart is towards Him, glory can and will come. Do not let your failures, your sinning, your imperfections, become death to you. They need not be. Bring them to the hands of the God of glory, for that is the story of David from another angle. I thank God that David's sins and failures are all written in large letters; they have not been covered up. Oh, problem as it may be, there it is, he comes to glory. We may fail, we may sin, default, go wrong, but given that our hearts are where David's heart was, to the Lord, the Lord can take hold of the shame, the tragedy, the ignominy, and turn it to glory. He can, He has done it, and He will, and when that day comes, the day of manifestation of His glory, it will be not in lovely things which never had anything bad or wrong about them, but vessels of mercy, and the chief element in the glory will be grace.

Chapter 4 - "Skilful in Playing"

"...Having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will" (Eph. 1:5).

"But we behold Him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honour, that by the grace of God He should taste of death for every man. For it became Him, for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings" (Heb. 2:9-10).

These Scriptures, with all other Scriptures, are intended to be windows, and the purpose of windows is to give you a view and to let light in. We do not usually, when we are brought to windows, comment upon the windows themselves and say, "These are very nice windows, pretty windows, artistic windows!" or, "These are very wonderful windows". We look through them. They are there for that purpose. Many people are occupied with the letters of the Bible, the windows themselves, and miss the view. That is, they miss the very purpose of the Bible. The Bible is not given to us as something to occupy us with itself. It is given to us as a great means of viewing the beyond. These passages which we have just read are specimens or types. They are of the windows of heaven through which the greatest panorama ever conceived can be viewed. It is the Lord's will that we should catch at least some glimpse of that marvellous view to which we are introduced by such words as we have read.

God's Full Purpose

What they bring into view is nothing less than the original, supreme, ultimate, all-inclusive purpose of God in this universe. It is God's purpose for the universe that can be seen through these fragments of Scripture, a universe filled with His glory and as such, a universe as His own heritage: that which is for God in the first place - His pleasure, His satisfaction. But it does not stop there. As you notice, it brings in people who are called sons. "Bringing many sons to glory". These are the firstfruits of that great purpose of a universe filled with the glory of God. While such a universe is God's heritage, He is the heir of that, these who are called sons are His heirs in and through His Son who has redeemed the universe unto God. "Heirs of God" (Rom. 8:17) the Scripture is, heirs of God to come into God's heritage, "joint-heirs with Christ", with His Son.

The Begetting of Sons

The present work of God in relation to that full purpose of His is firstly the bringing of these people into being by birth, the begetting of these children. Everyone born of God is a potential heir of God. Being born of God is not just the beginning and end of everything, is not just something in itself, it is unto this tremendous inheritance. But it begins there, and there is no hope of the inheritance until we are born of God, born anew, born from above.

Training in Sonship

The next thing that God is doing at this present time is training those born-again ones in sonship. The whole course of the life of a child of God is intended to be training in sonship. To put that in another way: training in how to give God His inheritance, how to bring glory to God. Understand that, dear friends, it is a very important thing for us to grasp. Let me repeat it. The whole course and career of a child of God is intended to be governed by this one thing: how to bring glory to God. The apostle Paul grasped that so strongly, clearly and fully. He put it at one time into a phrase. He said, "As always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether by life, or by death" (Phil. 1:20). That comprehended his whole life, and that is what God is doing with us if we are children of God - dealing with us as sons, training us in sonship, which, in other words, is training us for glory, to bring glory to Him, that God may have His inheritance in us.

Preparing for the Coming-of-age Day

And the third thing that the Lord is doing in this and by these means and along this line is therefore the preparing of a company, a family, a body for the great coming-of-age day. The word employed by the apostle - 'adoption' - relates to children of God, and not those who are outside of the family. It relates to the day when God will adopt His own children. The real meaning of the word is that coming of age of the child.

Now, we do not hear so much about it in our days, but there was a time when a coming of age in a family was a very great event, especially in the families of what are called the nobility. There the firstborn son, having been under the father's care and discipline, training, for all those years in the family as a child, now arrived at his majority, came of age, and it was a great event. First of all, the father and the son on the morning of that twenty-first birthday had a very solemn time together in the father's own room. He called his son in, and together in a spirit of wonderful new friendship they talked. The father talked over all the years that had been and all that he had had in his heart, explained why perhaps he had seemed sometimes to be hard, difficult and strict, explained just what he had been aiming at in all his dealings and longing for that son. He laid it all out before him, and then he said, "My boy, this is the day when you have to enter into all that; take it up, honour it, respect it and fulfil it. From today it is up to you to fulfil all my hopes and my expectations, and answer to all my dealings with you." On the other side, the son, in that spirit of love and understanding, would respond and say. "Yes, I will, God helping me. I will not let you down, nor fail you, nor bring dishonour to your name. I will do all possible to bring the honour and the glory to you that is your due."

But beyond that, other great things were happening. The whole house was astir, great preparations were going on down in the commissariat department. All the servants and all the guests were in action for this great day, and presently, before the day is past, there will be a great celebration, many gathered together, much singing and rejoicing. The son of this highly honoured citizen had come of age.

That is a very poor reflection of what is seen through this window, the great day when the sons of God will be manifested (Rom. 8:21) and onwards, the great day of the coming of age when all God's dealings and discipline and all that He has been seeking and desiring reaches its fulfilment, and He enters into the inheritance of it all. That is the day of glory, and God is preparing for that, bringing many sons to glory. That is what He is doing now.

But for the moment that which is the in-between of the two things is the matter which engages us - training in sonship, training in the great business of bringing glory to God.

Glory Through Sonship

Now we can return to David with whom we were so much occupied earlier as a great representative of this very matter. You will remember we saw that the issue, the culmination and the vindication of David's whole life, was found in Solomon his son. The day came when everything was transferred from David to Solomon. Solomon inherited all that his father had prepared for more than forty years. Sonship took it all up, and the reign of Solomon being the most glorious thing in the whole of the Old Testament on this earth, illustrates this very principle, that glory comes through sonship, after much preparation, inworking, and spiritual history. We have pointed out what a large place God gives to David even in the New Testament. Apart from the quotations from David's writings, his psalms, his name is mentioned no fewer than forty-seven times, and he is also the last person mentioned in the Bible. Right there at the end of Revelation 22, within an inch of the end of the Bible, David's name is mentioned, and he comes up in a very wonderful way. Jesus, the great Son, saying, "I am the root and the offspring of David", giving David a tremendously honoured place, bringing him right up to the last.

Without dwelling upon all that is said about David in the New Testament and the titles given to him (patriarch, prophet, king, and psalmist), we look to see again why it is that God gave David such a place, why he is kept so much in view with so much honour. Well, the answer simply is this: because he so greatly fell in with the eternal thought of God, that is, he fell so fully in with God's intention to get glory, to bring glory to God as God's rightful inheritance. That sums up David.

The Nature of True Blessing

Let us there put our finger very definitely upon an abiding truth. Let us write it in our hearts deeply and clearly that our glory and blessing comes by way of a heart wholly for God, a heart that is wholly set upon God having the glory. Our blessing comes that way.

If David was made a lot of, it was not because David himself was such a wonderful person, it was because God had such a large place in David's heart and life. The one thing through all that David was seeking, was to bring glory to God. In every way he sought to bring things round to God. And again I say, if we are seeking blessing, if we are seeking glory, if we are seeking to be used of the Lord, if we are seeking a way of service for God, let it be clearly understood that it will only come, but it will come, when we have forgotten ourselves and our own work and let everything go for God. It will come that way. David says that most clearly in the whole of his life, and the Bible, and the New Testament in particular, simply shout that. If you are wholly for God, God will be wholly for you. But be careful what you mean by being wholly for God. You are going to be tested on that up to the hilt.

What do you mean by blessing, by glory? When you think of being blessed or having blessing, that your life should be in the blessing of God, when you think of glory, what do you mean? We must search our hearts on this matter, we must challenge ourselves with this. Shall I tell you what I think it should mean with us, and what it really does mean in truth? Blessing and glory is proportionate to the measure of blessing that comes to others through us, and not the measure of blessing that comes to ourselves. Have you got that? Let us illustrate. Look at Paul. What do you feel to be the real seal of God upon that man, the real blessing of God upon Paul, the real glory of Paul? Is it not that for all these centuries a stream of blessing has been growing and deepening to multitudes of others? Is not that the greatest blessing that could come to anybody? An ever-growing blessing; when we have gone it goes on and others are coming into an increasing knowledge of the Lord. Do you not think that is glory? Do you not think that is blessing? And that was not true only of Paul. It was true of John. But that is the nature of blessing.

What do you want? To be made something of yourself? To be in a place of influence and power and recognition and personal glory? That is not it. If afterwards at the end there are many who can glorify God because of us, that is glory and blessing indeed. Let us be perfectly clear about this. It is not something being made of us, it is something being made of the Lord, and that being so, many faces lifted to the Lord in thankfulness for the river that flowed through us to them.

Six Features of God's Inheritance

Now you see that brings us to David in a peculiar way. Oh, what we owe to David! Let us turn to the Old Testament, for we must find some focal point for all this. It is altogether beyond us, we are just floundering in a mighty sea, so we must find ground somewhere. Let us turn to 1 Samuel 16. This is the chapter, as you see, which brings David first into view, and that occurs at the time when the Lord has departed from Saul the king, and an evil spirit has taken possession of Saul because of his disobedience and his tampering with that world of evil spirits through disobedience. Saul is tortured and tormented by this evil spirit, and in his distress and anguish cries for help, and conceives the idea that if someone can be found who has musical genius or ability, the music might soothe him and give rest to his tortured mind and soul. And while this enquiry for such a person is, so to speak, suspended in the air, a young man speaks up.

"Then answered one of the young men, and said, Behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, that is skilful in playing, and a mighty man of valour, and a man of war, and prudent in speech, and a comely person; and the Lord is with him" (v.18).

There is a conference for you! It seems to be very casual, but it is not as casual as it seems, that this young man should have been standing by and have heard the request for a musician and should be acquainted with the one whom he believed was most suitable for this. When you remember how long after all this the history was written, and it was probably not written by anyone who was on the scene; although it goes by the name of the Book of Samuel it is quite clear that Samuel did not write all this, but that the Spirit of God, governing and controlling the writing of the Scriptures should have put that eighteenth verse in. For within the compass of those few sentences, you have six of the greatest features of sonship, six of the greatest features of God's inheritance, six of those things which, characterising the whole life of David, resulted in this so much glory to God. If the Lord helps us, we shall go through those six things. If you like to say they are five, and the last one is all-inclusive covering the five, all right, it does not matter. But here we are.

The Spirit of Worship Developed in Secret

Let us begin. What is the first? "Skilful in playing". That introduces us to the whole of David's life of music, of worship. It is the introduction of all that we have in the Psalms and through the Psalms through all these many centuries. The Psalms of David became the hymn book of the Hebrew nation, the book of worship for the whole of Israel. 'Psalm' just means a poem set to music. The Hebrew title for this book was, and is, The Book of Praises, and here we begin.

Praise. The first simple intimation is that David was a musician; he was skilful in music. Where had he learned, where had he practised, where had he developed this particular feature of his life? In solitude. Up to this point, David was unknown. He was living most of his time away back there in the fields of Bethlehem caring for sheep and lambs. There in the solitude, the secret, the hidden life, he developed the spirit of praise, the spirit of worship, the spirit of music. In solitary exercise was found that which brought him right out into his life ministry, and into his public place.

How did that young man know? Evidently he had overheard. David was quite clearly not a public musician at this time. He was not known in public, or they would not have had to enquire as they did. But someone knew the secret history of David, what was going on outside and away from the public eye, and it was there that this tremendous thing for God found its inception and its growth. If you think that is making something of nothing, or inclining that way, do remember how much of David's secret history was fundamental to his life work. We touch upon that later. What happened way back there in the fields of Bethlehem did produce the very foundation of his life later, because it was with the combat with Goliath that David found his place in Israel, and in that combat David referred to what happened in secret in Bethlehem when a lion and a bear took a lamb from his flock.

Worship the Key to Service

What are we to learn? To begin with, there is no need for us to push ourselves forward, and there is no need for other people to push us forward. If the thing is in us, that thing which is our exercise Godward, for God's pleasure, for God's satisfaction, for God's glory, if it is in us apart from the public eye, apart from anything to stimulate it by applause in our secret history with God, it is going to come out. God will see to that. Do not worry about your life-work. Do not worry about getting a place in the service of God, do not worry when you are going to be used by the Lord. If you have got the secret between you and the Lord in your secret life, that is going to show itself; it is going to make its own opportunity. Do remember that.

You are worrying about when you are going to start on your life-work, you are thinking about the day when you will come out into the service of the Lord. You know how people think like that. There is always that tomorrow when we shall take up our life-work. If you are not doing it in secret now, you may wait all the days of your life, and they will be gone, and it will never happen, for your life-work begins in secret with God, and the key, mark you, to all service through the whole Bible is worship. God has always called His service worship and worship His service. "Let My son go, that he may serve Me" (Ex. 4:23), the Lord said to Pharaoh. And how did they serve Him? By worship.

Well, you see, that is a very important thing. The spirit of worship is not something which we do first of all in public. Worship is not something that begins when we are in the hot air of emotional crowds. Worship is not that kind of thing at all to begin with. It is something in the heart between us and the Lord. It is that which gives the Lord so much place, and you see all this that came out of David's life of music, which was all worship, because there was a spirit of worship in him. Some musical people, or people of music, can do all sorts of things with their gift. They will write a sacred cantata one day, and they will write a comic opera the next. But David was of one heart. It was not just this musical gift being employed for all sorts of purposes, but only for one thing - the Lord. David had this way of referring everything to the Lord. That is where the great end of glory, God's inheritance, begins - in secret where no one else knows anything about it, just worship, the outflow of the heart in music to the Lord. And sometimes it is songs without words, sometimes it is just music to the Lord for which there are no words.

Worship and the Evil Powers

Then, note, the first mention of David's life of music is connected with the evil powers in Saul. What had happened? Oh, get this, this is a key to so much! Saul had been given a great opportunity, the highest opportunity, but he had been disobedient. He had taken things into his own hands and had pushed himself forward. He was a man who could not wait, who could not stand back, who could not keep his hands off. Samuel had said, "Tarry, till I come unto thee" (1 Sam. 10:8). Saul could not tarry. He must do something; he was restless, impatient. He took hold of the things of God himself, and in disobedience allied himself with the evil powers, because Samuel said, you know, "Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as idolatry and teraphim" (1 Sam. 15:23), linking on with that other world. He opened the door to the powers of evil, and he lost the kingdom. By seeking to possess, to have in himself, and not being ready to wait for God, he lost everything. But Satan gained his footing.

Now, you know that Satan's object from the beginning, whenever and wherever that was (another door in Scripture through which you see something happening) Satan not able to take second place to God or to God's Son, not able to be in subjection and follow a life of obedience, must grasp, take hold and draw to himself. That is Satan, the prince of this world seeking to draw everything away from God in order to take God's place. In the ultimate manifestation of Satan incarnate in this world in Antichrist, he will be sitting in the temple of God, giving out that he is God and being worshipped as God. That is his ambition. David came in with his music over against that whole thing, and what was the principle, again, of David's life of music? Everything for God. You see the clash. Two kingdoms, one taking from God, the other bringing everything to God. David's life of music, we are saying, was introduced in the Bible in connection with the presence of evil powers molesting the kingdom of God.

Everything Turned into Worship

Well, from that day forward, this wonderful thing develops, so that, as we were saying yesterday, David turned everything into music, turned everything into psalms. All his experiences, all his history, he turned into psalms. It is of real value, and I recommend it to you as being very profitable, to try to trace when and where David wrote his psalms. You can do that to some extent by using any good Bible which puts at the head of the psalm: "A Psalm of David when..." and then the occasion and the situation mentioned. He turned everything into a psalm. When Absalom drove him from his throne, David expressed it in music and in the words of a psalm. The heading of one psalm is: "When Absalom usurped the throne". He composed a great volume of psalms out of his spiritual experience. That is the value of the psalms. His life was in them, and that volume of psalms became, as we have said, the book of Israel's praises, and led on to the full development of this through all his experiences which provided a new psalm, each one of which provided a new psalm, until at last David organised the whole thing for the temple worship.

He drew together a choir of four thousand voices. He organised their singing into twenty-four courses so that there was no pause in the singing in Israel day nor night. No sooner had one course finished than the next took it up round the whole twenty-four hours of every day and every week and every month and every year; continuous worship, a continuous unbroken flow of glory to God, making everything glorify God. What is it if it is not turning everything to the Lord? He turned his deep and dark experiences, even his tragedies, failures and his desperate sin, to the Lord. That is why he is so beloved of God because when he got down into the depths he remembered Him and turned it to Him and found his way up and out through worship.

Worship a Militant Factor

It is a long history. David did not begin worship, did not begin music, in the Bible. We saw earlier that it began somewhere among the sons of God when God laid the foundations of the earth. The first time that music is known of in the Bible is mentioned in Job 38:7 when the foundations of the earth and all the sons of God sang. It began there. This is something of tremendous consequence. This kind of thing, this kind of music, this kind of worship is a most powerful thing. In the great parenthesis between Adam's creation and that great scene of redemption where out of every nation, tongue, tribe and kindred a great multitude which no man can number are seen and heard to be singing, singing has been the most potent and powerful weapon against all that came in with Satan's fall, that can be found in the Bible. It is so often connected with battle, with warfare; it is a great militant factor.

"The lion of the tribe of Judah... has overcome" (Rev. 5:5) that is a part of the heavenly song, the ascription of worship and praise. Judah means 'Praise'. The Lion of the tribe of Judah is only a figurative way of speaking of the tremendous power, militant power, of praise. I am not going to gather up all the Scriptures that there are to bear that out. That praise that is worship, bringing things to God, is something of tremendous account in the spiritual world. Martin Luther found his escape many times by that means. He knew something of the onslaught of Satan and the evil powers. He seemed sometimes to have a literally hand-to-hand fight with the devil. He even threw ink-pots at him! He makes it perfectly clear again and again when those terrible evil forces assailed that he found his way out by singing. "Let us sing, brother." That is the way out, something tremendous. Praise, which is only another word for worship, makes a throne for the Lord.

Worship Provides God with a Throne

Psalm 22 is one of the great Psalms of David, one of the great Messianic psalms. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" That is how it begins, but already in the third verse you hear that psalmist cry, "O Thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel". God is provided with a throne for ruling, for governing, when His people worship and praise.

Worship Provides God with a Habitation

This provides God with a habitation. In Psalm 114:2, speaking of the glorious procession of the people of God at the beginning out from Egypt and on towards the inheritance, the little phrase occurs: "Judah became His sanctuary." It is only a figurative way of saying that a sanctuary is provided by the praise. Judah led the way in the battle and in the procession. Praise always does, and God is there. Judah was His sanctuary.

Worship Puts the Lord Over Everything

Well, it amounts to this, so far as I see, in trying to gather up this whole matter of praise and worship in the Bible: it is the way and the means by which the Lord is put over everything. That is how the Lord is put over everything. It is a tremendous thing to be able to put the Lord over everything, even your sin, failure, breakdown, distress, perplexity, sufferings, adversities, the attitudes and activities of your enemies - to put the Lord over them. That is what David did.

Worship Puts Everything on the Side of Victory

Again, this is the means by which everything was put over on the side of victory. When Israel came out of Egypt and went through the Red Sea, reached the other side, and the Egyptians were overwhelmed, "then sang Moses and the children of Israel" (Ex. 15:1). They are on the victory side. The praise, the singing, signifies that you are standing on the ground of victory. And is that not true all the way through? It must be that. There are, of course, forms of singing and music which are on the defeat side, sometimes people just sing to keep their spirits up.

I remember when I was a very small boy living in Scotland, sometimes we had so many guests that I could not stay in the house, and I had to go a couple of miles along the high road between pine forests, at 10 or 11 at night, and if you had heard me you would probably have thought I was the most courageous youngster in the province. The fact is that I was the most timid youngster in the whole country, and I was just singing and whistling and making an awful noise to save the situation. I was not on the victory side at all. There was terror and fear in my heart. The owls were hooting in the trees, and it was all very frightening, but you can do that sort of thing and pretend. But real singing that comes from the heart means you are on the victory side and that means that victory is with the Lord because you are on the Lord's side.

But we must gather it up into this. When we come to the book of the Revelation, the great book of consummations, finalities, so far as the Lord's people are concerned, it is all singing. Oh, what music! The great throng singing, worshipping. What I want to say in that connection is this. David, musician as he was, worshipper as he was, provider of praise as he was, sometimes went down to the deepest depths of despair. "Why art thou cast down, O my soul? And why art thou disquieted within me?" (Ps. 42:5). Some of his psalms are 'de profundis', they come from the very depths of darkness. But they always finish on the top note. If he says, "Why art thou cast down, O my soul? And why art thou disquieted within me?" He also says, "Hope thou in God; for I shall yet praise Him" (Ps. 42:5). Say it to yourself, dear tried, oppressed soul. The end of the Bible is singing for the people of God. We go through the depths, we go through the valley of weeping, we go through the dark things, but the end is given to us. Here is a window through which to look and see how it is going to turn out, what is going to be the end.

I remember when I was in hospital several years ago a poor fellow in the bed opposite first had one leg off and then the other, and this is how things were going with him, and he was crying all the time, "Oh, where is it all going to end?" Day and night, "Where is it all going to end?" It was a good thing to be able to say something of how it could end. Do you feel like that sometimes? What is the end going to be? How is it going to work out? God has given you a window, and do you think that those people in that great glorious choir in heaven presented to us in chapter 5 of the book of the Revelation, that those people never had hours of despair, never had hours when they felt they would never sing again, that they had every reason imaginable for not singing at all? I expect they all did, because it says, "These are they that come out of the great tribulation, and they washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they before the throne of God" (Rev. 7:14-15). That is how it is going to turn out. Start and keep singing. "Whoso offereth the sacrifice of thanksgiving glorifieth Me; and to him that ordereth his way aright will I show the salvation of God" (Ps. 50:23).

Chapter 5 - "A Mighty Man of Valour"

"...Bringing many sons to glory" (Heb. 2:10).

"Wherefore, holy brethren, partakers of a heavenly calling..." (Heb. 3:1).

The heavenly calling is - "bringing many sons to glory".

We are occupied with the matter of God's heritage of glory in sons, and David is being instrumental in giving us some understanding of what that means, seeing the whole of David's life issued in his son Solomon and the glorious kingdom, the kingdom of glory - sonship and glory, the full glory of God.

Will you turn back again to 1 Sam. 16:18: "Then answered one of the young men, and said, Behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, that is skilful in playing, and a mighty man of valour, and a man of war, and prudent in speech, and a comely person; and the Lord is with him." In this verse there are six things said about David which are features of sonship, which issue in the glory of God. The first of these occupied the last chapter - "skilful in playing" - the phrase by which David's whole life ministry of worship and praise through the psalms is introduced. I am going to pass on to the next thing about him.

What Real Valour Is

"A mighty man of valour", how God gets glory through valour. It is interesting and significant to take note of the immediate combination of music with strength, because it is a rare combination; that is, naturally. It is something that is very striking about David. I hope I shall give offence to no one, but you know the artistic temperament is not always characterised by a great deal of valour. It is a temperamental temperament, and is usually a prey to varying moods. But there is this about David which is very clear all through his life, that even if he was artistic in temperament, one very much influenced by his feelings, or one who had very strong feelings and emotions, David is always seen to be conquering them, rising above them, triumphing over them. And that is really valour.

Valour right at its beginning is getting on top of ourselves, our own moods and feelings, the influence and effect of things upon our own souls. That is a real realm of conflict and battle. Valour begins within, not without. That is why there is a distinction here between a mighty man of valour, and a man of war. We come to that later, but there is a difference. War begins inside. The outward battles arise from something already that has taken place inside us; it is really something to do with us before it is to do with anyone else, and thus it was with David.

There is no doubt about it that his psalms do betray a tremendous amount of soul feeling, and that his was a very big and strong soul. But alongside of that, those same psalms show how David was always getting on top of his own soul. "Why art thou cast down, O my soul? And why art thou disquieted within me?" (Ps. 42:5). He says to himself, 'Come along now, get up, none of that' - "Hope thou in God; for I shall yet praise Him." There was a time when David was having a very bad experience, and he said some very bad things about the Lord, some very hard things, because he was bitter in spirit. He saw the prosperity of the wicked, and that the righteous and the faithful were apparently being defeated. Judged by human standards, it looked as though the Lord was really not just, not righteous, and he began to talk like that. But then he pulled himself up strongly, he took right hold of himself and said, "This is my infirmity; but I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most High" (Ps. 77:10). That is only another way, the poetic and better way, of saying, 'Now, look here, that will not do, my soul, you must not go down that street. Come along now, remember the Lord, do not forget you have had bad times before, but the Lord has been faithful.' That is real valour, and God gets a great deal of glory out of that.

God comes into His inheritance when men and women who have a disposition and a make-up that is prone to go off at a tangent or to get down, very far down in gloom, swayed and influenced by circumstances and things, take hold of themselves in the Name of the Lord, and say, 'Now look here, remember the Lord! You have had bad times before, the Lord has not let you down, you are still going on in spite of many such experiences. And that is not due to you; that is due to the Lord.' The Lord gets glory along that line. It is very simple, but it is very true. That really is valour as brought out with David. It is the battle with his own soul, and ascendancy over it, for his temperament could have played him all sorts of tricks and led him into final and utter disaster if he had not this one dominating motive: 'This is not to the glory of God, getting down here, behaving like this, talking like this, feeling like this. This does not honour the Lord; I must get up out of this.' The glory of God was the great governing factor with David, and that motive made him a man of valour, a mighty man of valour.

Valour in Secret

And, as in other things, David being a mighty man of valour was that first of all, inside where no one else saw any of it. It is easy to be a mighty man of valour when everybody is looking on, when we have got an audience. It is quite a different thing when you are having a bad time and alone. Your only motive then is the Lord, not people. You have no other inspiration than the thought: 'Well, what is the Lord getting out of this? Not very much, therefore it must not go on.'

Well, we are not concerned here with valour as a subject in itself, but as something which does bring glory to God. A marginal word for 'valour' is 'courage', and when you take the measurement of David, you find that you have to measure his stature by his courage, that his spiritual stature was determined, in his case, by courage. To put that in another way, there is nothing which dwarfs people more than fear. Fear always results in cowardice, and everybody despises a coward. There is no stature in fear. It makes us all very small. David was a mighty man, but his mightiness, if you like, his 'gigantic stature', which in its effect was far greater than that mighty Goliath, was according to his courage, his valour. He was a mighty man of valour.

This young man who said this, and others who came to take account of David, recognised that whether his brothers in the flesh were bigger in natural stature and physique, or whether Goliath towered over every other man in Israel, this is the really mighty man. It is not measured by natural standards at all. The measurement was his valour, his courage. Now that is the thing in view.

The Weakness of Fear

Let us get back to the root of this: the first mention of fear in the Bible. According to the well-known rule, the first mention of anything in the Bible always contains the elements which are subsequently developed to the full, and so it is with this matter of fear. We have it in Genesis 3:9-10: "And the Lord God called unto the man, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard Thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself."

"I was afraid." That is the first mention of fear in the Bible, and it represents something altogether new in the constitution of man. The Lord God had walked in the garden before, perhaps many times, in the cool of the day, and there had never been this at all, but perfect openness, freedom, restfulness, quiet assurance and confidence. Here is something new. The man is afraid. A thing which had never been on all previous occasions is now present, something called fear. Where has it come from? It has just sprung out of sin and disobedience. Sin and disobedience has changed the relationship with God, and whereas before then the man knew nothing of this and walked uprightly, confidently in the presence of the Lord, before the Lord God, now he is cringing, unnerved, weak, seeking cover; he is afraid.

This is the effect of Satan's influence. Wherever there is judgment, there is fear. James says that the devils tremble (James 2:19). You can say a lot about that very thing in the realm of the evil powers, that the thing which dominates them is fear, terror, dread. When they speak, they say, "Art Thou come hither to torment us before the time?" (Matt. 8:29). They are betrayed. They know their doom and they are in terror. Fear has come from Satan's influence. Therefore it is not surprising, but quite illuminating that the last mention of fear in the Bible, right at the end of the book of the Revelation, places fearfulness or the fearful, with the unbelieving, the abominable, murderers, fornicators, idolaters, liars. The fearful are included in that bunch, a full ripe work of Satan.

The Basis of Valour

a) A good conscience

Then what is valour? If that is fear, the nature and basis of fear, valour or courage must rest upon exactly the opposite basis. It rests upon what? A good conscience towards God. It is a great thing in spiritual fortitude and inward strength in the cohesion of the inward life, to have a good conscience before God, to be able to walk before God without cringing and fear. The most fearless or the most valorous person that has ever walked this earth was the Lord Jesus, and that life, marked so wonderfully by spiritual and moral courage, was like that because of an absolutely clear way between Him and His Father. You say, 'Yes, that is very good for Him, and what you say may be perfectly true.' But is not this the very foundation of our salvation? Yes, a good conscience towards God. The very provision that is made in the Cross and in the blood of the Lord Jesus is that we should be cleansed from an evil conscience. The very meaning of our baptism, according to Peter's word, is this: "the answer of a good conscience towards God" (1 Pet. 3:21). Something happened, something has been done to undercut all that work in the garden which made man cringe in the presence of God. We know what has been done. Fear undercuts the work of the Cross of the Lord Jesus, and this kind of spiritual courage is the vindication of Christ's Cross. A good conscience towards God - what a grand thing! All the great doctrine of justification by faith is crowded into that - a good conscience towards God, and a good conscience makes men of us, makes sons of us. An evil conscience makes cravens of us. Valour, then, rests upon a good conscience, the conscience cleansed and resting upon all the effect of the work of Christ, just as the evil conscience rests upon the fact of the work of Satan.

b) Complete faith in God

Valour is also derived from a complete faith in God. David is a great example of that. There is no mistaking that, that his valour, his courage, sprang out of this faith which he had in God. He believed God implicitly. It is beautiful, even as a young man, how it comes out. When we deal with him as a man of war, we shall see it in particular connections, but here it is. This young man had a mighty faith in God, and that faith in God produced this spirit of courage. It always does. Such a faith is essential to spiritual courage. If you and I are not sure of God, we are weak and there is not much valour about us. See anybody who has a question about the Lord, who is not sure of the Lord, and you see a weak person. See a person who believes God, who can say as did the apostle, "I believe God" (Acts 27:25), "I believe God, that it shall be", and that man has taken command of the ship and the commander of the ship and the commander of the military forces, the whole situation. There is a courage there about that man that is not natural. "I believe God."

c) A knowledge of the Lord

Therefore this rests upon knowing the Lord. "The people that know their God shall be strong, and do exploits" (Dan. 11:32). Spiritual courage rests upon knowing the Lord, and that would open to us in itself a very large field of profitable consideration. But we content ourselves with this, and you will see much more through what I say than I am saying, that the Lord builds up in us strength by taking us through difficult, trying, adverse situations and experiences in which we get to know Him in a new way. The very reason why He does take us through those difficult experiences is in the first place that we should know Him. The result of every fresh trial and suffering ought to be that we have proved the Lord, we have come to know the Lord, and our attitude towards all such things should be: 'I am going to learn something more of the Lord through this.' And when we come out of it with that, we are very much more confident and assured with spiritual courage for the next thing. A person of courage or valour is one who faces a new situation in the strength of having proved the Lord in the last one, who does not go down before a new situation because there is something to draw upon of knowledge of the Lord.

d) A love relationship with God

This all means that the relationship with God has been put right. We said that the relationship between Adam and the Lord was changed, but now it is put right. And what is the relationship? It is the relationship of mutual love. Firstly, God's love for us, and then our love for God. "Perfect love casteth out fear... there is no fear in love" (1 John 4:18), says the apostle. If we believe that God is love and that His love is towards us, that completely undercuts fear. The relationship is recovered, restored and established. It is, of course, common knowledge that hatred and fear go together. Look at it in nations. Fear produces hatred. People hate because they fear. If you have love, you have no fear, and if we have love for God, we have no fear. That relationship does not permit fear.

Now, what I am saying is not only a statement of truths, but it is a test and a challenge. All this is fundamental to our salvation. That is the basis of valour or courage.

The Essence of Valour

What is the essence of it? Well, if you take David again as the example - mark you, we are talking about features of real sonship which bring glory to God - the essence of courage or valour is firstly a facing and undertaking of things altogether beyond our measure in the interests of the Lord. That is courage, the mountain to be overcome, the tremendous odds to be ruled out. Look at David over that. Again and again it was like that. We cannot but anticipate by reminding ourselves of the bear and the lion, the Goliath, and much more through his life. But he attached to every incident of that kind the glory of God. He brought in the Name of the Lord and made it a testimony to the Lord. He undertook things. Now find the man today anywhere on the earth who will tackle a real live lion, and a young man at that, and literally tear it asunder and leave it dead. And a bear. It is said that in the jungles of India even a tiger, a man-eating tiger, fears the bear. A bear is its greatest enemy. Find the young man who will tackle a bear and leave it destroyed. If David had been any other kind of man than the one he was, when he saw the bear and the lion come and attack the lamb, he would have said, 'Better let him have it, I am not going to risk my skin for a lamb.' We will touch that in another connection for another point, but here it is.

What about this Goliath fellow? All Israel are in terror of that man. It says that when he came out and bawled before them, they trembled and fled, they all ran away, all Israel, David's big brothers too! Now then, is this tackling something beyond him? Saul pointed that out very clearly, "Look here, you cannot go and fight with him, he is a warrior by training from his youth, and you are a stripling". But David tackled something for the glory of God altogether beyond himself. That is valour.

Now, the lion and the bear and the Goliath and a few other things may only be types, figures. You may know what they mean in your life, but there is no doubt about it that you and I are brought face to face with things that are altogether beyond us naturally, and the Lord allows that. Then it is a test of this courage born of "knowing the Lord", believing God and inspired by a great zeal for the glory of God. "If I perish, I perish" (Esther 4:16) - 'for the glory of God, here goes...'. That is not natural, though the language may sound like it. It is something very real.

Enduring Without Complaining

Courage is also in its essence a matter of enduring when you cannot do, and enduring without complaining, for the glory of God. That is the essence of courage - enduring. Very often we are helped a great deal by being able to do. It helps us over a lot of difficulties to be able to do something. When it is not possible to do anything, and the only thing left is to endure and be patient, it requires real courage. That is a realm in which valour has very real meaning, and David had a lot of that. For years David could do nothing about his situation. He was persecuted, driven out, hunted, his life sought. He was not being able to do anything about it, his hands were tied. Saul was put at his mercy more than once, but inwardly the Lord would not let him do anything for his own vindication or deliverance. No, he just had to suffer this thing, bear it, endure it. He had a bad time. Some psalms came out of that, pretty bad psalms too, and yet triumphant psalms. Look at the headings again - "A Psalm of David when he was pursued by Saul". Yes, with real raging conflict within, but David is not going to take an easy way out, he is not going to set his hand for his own vindication. He is going to wait God's time; he is going to be patient, endure, be steadfast. Under trial, persecution, misunderstanding, slander and reproach, for the glory of God, hold on, wait God's time. God vindicated in the long run, but this is the way of the training of sons. All this was ultimately gathered up into the glory. It was the glory of a Divine courage.

The Value of Valour

What was the value of this courage, this valour? Was it just something that was limited to David himself? Was God just dealing with David to make him something of spiritual measure? No, the real value, while it was secured in David in very practical ways by a very hard school, was because he was to be prince or leader of the people of God. He had got to be an inspiration to the Lord's people. We are deriving value from this now. Oh, do we not, in a time of need, almost spontaneously, instinctively, turn to the Psalms? Is it not out of those Psalms of David that there comes to us succour and assurance, strength and new confidence? How many times have we laid hold of his words for our own inward salvation? "My flesh and my heart faileth; but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever" (Ps. 73:26). The Lord through this was making him in spirit and in principle a leader, a prince, a true son, one who would inspire others. That is the value of courage. If we are fearful, afraid, cringing, without assurance, not resting upon what Christ is for us unto God and from God to us, if our feet are not upon that rock, there is no leadership about us, there is no inspiration to others. You cannot but be an inspiration, you cannot but be a leader in principle, if you have this kind of spiritual courage born of faith in God.

The Secret of Valour

Well, the secret of valour. What is the secret of this courage? The answer is in one little phrase or sentence from the New Testament: "God gave us not a spirit of fearfulness; but of power and love and discipline" (2 Tim. 1:7). What is the secret? 'The spirit that God has not given us...' that negative statement is a thrust at the enemy. The other spirit, another spirit, that spirit, that evil spirit, is a spirit of fear. That comes from the dark quarter of judgement, dread and terror. That is a spirit which comes out of the darkness. God hath not given us that spirit, God has given us another spirit. The spirit which God hath given us is not fear but a sound mind (A.V.) which means assurance, confidence, certainty. The secret of courage, then, is the Spirit that God has given us.

Open your book of the Acts and see the marvellous change that comes in that book. Where did we leave the men who are re-introduced to us? With all their vaunted self-confidence and valour, what happened to them? Peter, the leader of them all, is intimidated by a little serving-maid and lies with oaths and curses to save his own flesh to get out of a difficult situation, and "they all forsook Him and fled". That is the picture. Then in the book of the Acts, what a change! What is the thing that is constantly up? "When they beheld the boldness of Peter and John..." (Acts 4:13). "With great power gave the apostles witness" (Acts 4:33). They are standing up to the rulers, anything but cowed or intimidated. "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). 'Do what you like, do your worst, we are not afraid!' This is a tremendous change. The same men, yet not the same. What has happened? The Holy Spirit has come, the Spirit of Jesus Christ has been supplied, the Spirit who takes up all the values of His Cross and its victory and brings those values in. "A good conscience towards God". I think that is tremendous.

You think of Peter. If ever there ought to have been a man who spent the rest of his life never wanting to meet another person, to look anybody in the face again, keeping out of the public eye, under a spirit of absolute condemnation with a bad conscience, that man ought to have been Peter. That man would have been Peter, but strangely and wonderfully the man who more than any other ought to have lived for evermore under the accusations of a bad conscience, this is the man who - well, there is no sign of any bad conscience about him, and later he will write in his letter "the answer of a good conscience towards God". Something has happened.

The Holy Spirit does make good the values of the Cross to deliver us from the sin and the condemnation and the judgement. The Spirit says to us "There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death" (Rom. 8:1-2). It is the Spirit that God gives that makes for courage and valour. Oh, may we see the way of sonship. This is what it means. You may have the subject, the theme of sonship, and you may delight in it and talk about it, but the thing is, is it true of us? The thing that matters is: are we upright, not in our own goodness and righteousness, but able to stand up, in the presence of God and before men, because we have our consciences cleansed and the relationship with God is alright; we know the Lord, we trust and believe God?

The Lord make us sons, and that is the way in which the Lord is glorified.

Chapter 6 - A Foretasting of the Glory in Terms of Praise

"Then answered one of the young men, and said, Behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, that is skilful in playing, and a mighty man of valour, and a man of war, and prudent in speech, and a comely person; and the Lord is with him" (1 Sam. 16:18).

For now I am returning to the subject of chapter 4 when we were occupied with the ministry of praise and worship. I want to turn you to one of David's psalms, a psalm to which we have referred a number of times, Psalm 22. You will note how the psalm opens, and then pass from those words of terrible distress, darkness and affliction over to verse 22: "I will declare Thy name unto my brethren, in the midst of the assembly will I praise Thee." You know that is quoted in Hebrews 2:12: "I will declare Thy name unto my brethren, in the midst of the congregation will I sing Thy praise."

Now, that Psalm 22 is headed with the words, "To the Chief Musician". This is something handed over to the leader of praise, the leader of worship, to become a part of that great ministry under his direction. That is, it is something given by David to the chief musician for the people of God, an ordinance in Israel for ever. You remember how, long afterwards when the kingdom had been rent and divided, the captivity had at last taken place and these seventy years passed, and the remnant returned and Nehemiah came back to rebuild the destroyed wall of Jerusalem and he restored this ministry of praise. He sought out the Levites and set them in two great companies to march in opposite directions towards each other and meet as they sang these praises, and the phrase is, "as David had appointed". So this is an ordinance in Israel forever. It is something which marks the recovery of testimony, if Nehemiah represents anything at all.

But what is this twenty-second Psalm? It is the pathway from the deepest depths to the highest heights, from the bitter cry of forsakenness up to the place of absolute victory and right into the heart of a resurrection family. For that is the point that the apostle is making so strongly in the letter to the Hebrews where these words are quoted: "Both He that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one" (Heb. 2:11), one family, "for which cause He is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying, I will declare Thy name unto My brethren, in the midst of the congregation will I sing Thy praise" (v. 12). Right into the heart of a resurrection family, there to sound the praises relating to His tremendous victory over death, and that is gathered into those terrible first words - "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" So here we have the end which is the praise of His glory (Eph. 1:6). That is the end, the end for which we are kept, to which we are being brought.

The Eternal Future

But what about the present? Surely that is not all reserved to the future, to the coming ages. Surely this is meant for the present in some spiritual experience and reality. Surely now the risen Lord would sing and does sing in the midst of His brethren, in the midst of the assembly. Of course, we need to make a little adjustment about this matter of future and present. It will be helpful if we just spend a minute or two on that matter, because sooner or later, we shall all, the young men and the young women included, have to come to recognise that in Christianity the eternal future is predominant. Do you grasp that? The predominant thing in Christianity is the eternal future. We have to adjust to that. It is predominant. It is over all, it is the thing which governs everything in the Christian life - the eternal future.

But it is here that we need just to get things adjusted. There was a period in our history in this country particularly, but also beyond, when there was a predominance of an unhealthy morbidity in relation to the future. You have only got to take up that hymn-book, and you know there is a predominantly Victorian section in it. Those of us who have just emerged out of the Victorian era remember so well that the hymns which were most loved were the hymns about going to heaven and about the loved ones in heaven, and somehow or other nothing could be sung or said without bringing in the deathbed! We took our last gasp and floated away on wings and so on, sat on some mystical cloud dangling our legs over the edge, striking a harp. All that was the mentality. I do not mean to be funny, but that was the kind of thing that obtained for a long time. It came from a reaction represented by the Puritans, a proper reaction in its way, but there it was, and it was not healthy.

We now live in a time of the violent reaction to that. The pendulum has completely rebounded and swung to the other extreme, so that in our time it is this world and this life which has become more than anything else to most people. Things have so changed, with all the educational facilities and possibilities and provisions, with all the facilities for travel and seeing the world, and getting about, with all the tremendous development of that, and all the opportunities that exist now in this world, especially for young people, which did not obtain fifty years ago. This world has become something very much more. This life has taken on a new significance. The pendulum has swung to the other extreme, and young people do not like those ideas and thoughts and hymns about going to heaven and all that sort of thing.

We have got to get adjusted over this. It may be an extreme opposite to what was, but it carries just as great a danger as what was. We have to reaffirm that whether you sing those hymns or not, whether you like those ideas or not, the fact is that that eternal future governs everything, and we have got to set our lives in the light of it. We have to set our education in the light of it, we have got to set all the facilities that are given to us in the light of eternity. Even our recreation has got to come under the government of that eternal future, for, after all, a true child of God is someone who is disrelated from this world, and a true child of God going on with God, will find it more and more difficult to have a comfortable relationship with this world. The fact is, we will find it more and more true that we are pilgrims and strangers here.

Schooling for Eternity

Now, why all this? Because if it is true that the eternal future governs and dominates and overcircles everything for the people of God here on this earth, we have got to recognise one thing: that we are in a school for eternity, and that everything of the Lord in our lives is intended to be a part of our schooling for eternity. We will have to come to it. Some of us know this now increasingly as we get on. There is so much crowded into our lives which has no explanation nor justification if there is no eternal object in view. At the end the schooling is not completed. In the last years of our time we are not set out of school and given a little recreation, and playtime. We are not given a holiday at all. Right up to the end we are kept in the school and as we near the end we are conscious that we are only just beginning to learn.

I said to myself yesterday morning, 'Oh, that I had my time over again with my present sense of how much there is to be known in the Word of God!' We could live another dozen lives on what we are glimpsing. It is because of this great truth that this is only the preparation, schooling and education for sonship. This is the way to something which will justify everything, and we have got to get hold of that, because this life does become so much. There is that in us which clings to this life, to this world, and thinks it is everything. Our major disappointments and our greatest sufferings are because of temporal disappointments and things which belong to this life which are not as we would like to have them. It may be hard to accept, but sometimes it seems to me that the Lord is quite prepared to allow disappointments in a man's life so far as things here are concerned in order to get eternal things in that life. That is how it seems, so great is this matter of what we are called unto. We are called with a heavenly calling, and the glory lies there.

Joy a Present Fruit of the Spirit

What about this matter of praise? We are saying that the end is this fulness of praise, the whole universe filled with glory in terms of praise. That is the end, and I believe that the real fulfilment of this prophecy: "In the midst of the church will I sing Thy praise", is then. The real fulfilment, the completeness of that, is then in the glory when Christ in the midst of the great multitude which no man can number will sing in the midst of His brethren. But that future has got to come here, in some measure, and the future day does come into the present by the Holy Spirit. Remember that the Holy Spirit is the eternal Spirit and the Holy Spirit has the whole thing in mind and in hand, and is working towards the complete purpose of God, and everything that the Holy Spirit does is something that He is, so to speak, taking out of the eternal fulness and bringing it in. So the Holy Spirit, when He has His way, a free way in the people of God and in the midst of the people of God, will bring something of that eternal praise into their midst. He will bring Christ as the Chief Musician into our midst. He is bringing Christ in in many ways now. That is His work - to bring Christ in, and in many ways this is also His work, to bring that ultimate fulness of Christ's glory in praise, in singing, into His people now. That is sonship, and you and I are in the 'academy of music' of heaven now. We are supposed to be learning this great song of eternity.

Of course, we know it is true if we only look into our experience. When first the Lord came into our hearts, we thought we were ready for eternity right away, there was nothing more to be done. Heaven has begun; what are we waiting for? Yes, the Holy Spirit then gave us a touch of the ultimate. But then He has shown us ever since that we have to learn the principles of the way of glory, of sonship, and we are learning them in a hard school. Yes, the Holy Spirit would sing as Christ in our hearts and midst. It is what the New Testament speaks of so often as the Lord's joy. "That My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full" (John 15:11). Today we are historically, and I think in our hearts spiritually, remembering that great morning, but you remember about that morning when He appeared and spoke to them, it says "while they still disbelieved for joy" (Luke 24:41). If you are going to be an unbeliever, be one of those! That is the only kind of unbeliever that is allowed. "They disbelieved for joy." You see, the new note of the eternal future has been struck in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. That note did resound again and again on that day and during those forty days they were filled with joy, and then when the Holy Spirit came, you hear this note being struck everywhere. There was great joy in Jerusalem. They were scattered and it says "and there was much joy in that city" (Acts 8:8), and souls turned to the Lord. Well, it is true, "the fruit of the Spirit is... joy" (Gal. 5:22). That simply means that if the Holy Spirit is having His way, He will bring something of that eternal future of glory into our hearts now. I do feel that this is something to be recovered. I speak to myself just as strongly as to you, because I can be just as miserable as anybody. We need to recover this, this which emerges from the triumph of the Lord, which comes up out of that dark depth of His forsakenness on our behalf. We need that to be recovered in our hearts.

There is a very great deal that is practical in this connection, for I find that I can gather the New Testament around it, and especially I can gather the letters of Paul around this very thing. When Paul wrote his first letter to the Corinthians, there was not much joy. There was neither joy at Corinth nor in the apostle's heart, and remember he was a man full of the Holy Spirit and the condition of the heart of the apostle is a reflection of the Holy Spirit in him. If Paul cannot write with joy it is because the Holy Spirit in him is grieved. Therefore it means this - if this glory is to come in, if there is to be a foreshadowing and a foretasting of that eternal glory in terms of praise, things must not be as they were at Corinth. You never have the glory of the Father where there are divisions, not only between companies, but between groups, between twos and threes, and between twos alone. You will not have any song where that is so. If you really are governed by the Holy Spirit, if He is having His way in you, you will lose your song when you get out of tune with another child of God. Divisions, personal interests: "I am of Paul; and I of Apollos" (1 Cor. 1:12) bring in the 'I' and the song goes out. It is true to principle.

So I could go through this letter touching on this and that. There is no song, no music, no praise, no glory in it. You can never conceive of the eternal glory as having in it people in sectarian, divisive conditions. You have got to live with that other Christian for all eternity there, so start now! If you want the glory then, have the glory now. That is the basis. You know quite well, as I do, that it is true to principle. Get right, get that trouble cleared up, let Euodia and Syntyche be of one mind, and the joy at once returns, the song comes in. It is always like that. It is a miserable thing to be out of spirit and out of heart with another child of God.

Now, follow that through Paul. I am not going through all the letters, but you notice there are those where there is no song. To Galatia there is no song. It is almost a dirge, almost like a funeral march. Why? Things have been pulled down to the earth out of heaven and made traditional and legal. The song goes out when it is like that. Keep up in the heavenlies, off that kind of legalistic ground and the song will be heard. Think of Philippi, for example. Paul seems to be singing his way through his letter to the Philippians, "My brethren beloved and longed for, my joy and crown... my beloved" (Phil. 4:1). He cannot stop to find words for this overflowing. The song comes out in full harmony for Philippi. Why? Well, look again and see. You have got the nearest approach to something in the Philippian church and the Philippian letter that you have in the New Testament. The Holy Spirit brings the eternal future down into the present if He has His way, and these are the conditions, the laws of that sonship which is the consummation of everything in glory. These are the laws, and I can only introduce you to them and make these suggestions. The point is this, that the Holy Spirit wants to make us a joyful people, the people of all people on this earth who are having a good time, to fill with that which is going to fill eternity. Therefore the Holy Spirit must not be grieved or resisted, He must not be checked and frustrated. If He has His way the result will be joy in our hearts.

I must leave it there. You see, this is the ministry which brings to God His inheritance. It does say that the Lord has got what He has set His heart upon, and that is revealed in the psalm, the music, the joy of His people. "How good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! It is like the precious oil upon the head" (Ps. 133:1-2), and it is as precious to the Lord and more precious to the Lord, than it is to anyone else.

Chapter 7 - "A Man of War"

"Then answered one of the young men, and said, Behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, that is skilful in playing, and a mighty man of valour, and a man of war" (1 Sam. 16:18).

David's Triumphs the Inheritance of Solomon

That is the first intimation of David's life in relation to warfare, and what a life of warfare it was! Let us be reminded that what is standing over the whole of our consideration is how God comes into His inheritance. The apostle Paul said that he prayed on one occasion for the church that by the Holy Spirit it might have illumination and revelation as to God's inheritance in the saints. I think that is what we are in today, we are in that prayer; I trust in the answer to that prayer, having illumination as to God's inheritance in the saints, God's getting to Himself glory by way of sons and sonship. As we have seen, the culmination, consummation, and inclusiveness of David's life was found in Solomon his son, and in Solomon, the son, the kingdom of glory came in. The Lord, in figure at least, came into His inheritance. But we must remember that Solomon's great, glorious kingdom and reign, with all that is said about his magnificence, wealth, and his wisdom, all rested upon the universal victory of David. You know that to be so.

You look at such passages as that in 2 Samuel 8. We are arriving now at Solomon, it will not be long before he takes David's place on the throne, "And after this it came to pass, that David smote the Philistines, and subdued them: and David took the bridle of the mother city out of the hand of the Philistines. And he smote Moab... and the Moabites became servants to David" (2 Sam. 8:1,2). We will not read the whole chapter because it is all like that, David bringing under every kingdom and every king. And then you pass to 2 Chronicles 9:26, and you have, as to Solomon, "And he ruled over all the kings from the River even unto the land of the Philistines, and to the border of Egypt." The universal triumphs of David became the inheritance of Solomon, of the son.

It is quite impossible to fail to make the swift transition from David and Solomon to the greater Son of David, the Lord Jesus and how the church comes in as the vessel of the fulness of glory. "Unto Him be the glory in the church" on the ground of Christ's universal victory so that eventually that sonship in which the glory of God is secured and displayed rests upon Christ's victory in every realm. This is a clear foreshadowing. If we want that stated precisely we have to come again to a passage which is almost too familiar, Heb. 2:5: "For not unto angels did He subject the world to come, whereof we speak. But one hath somewhere testified, saying, What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? Or the son of man, that Thou visitest him? Thou madest him a little lower than the angels; thou crownedst him with glory and honour, and didst set him over the works of thy hands: Thou didst put all things in subjection under His feet." You know how the passage goes on. "We see not yet all things subjected to Him. But we behold Him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honour" (v. 8,9). And then the Word goes on "For both He that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one: for which cause He is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying, I will declare Thy name unto my brethren, in the midst of the congregation will I sing Thy praise." And further, "Wherefore, holy brethren, partakers ('partners' is the real word) in a heavenly calling..." (Heb. 3:1). The heavenly calling, the dominion in Christ, with Christ, over the whole world. It is a tremendous thought that sons are called to something higher than the vocation of angels. "Know ye not that we shall judge angels?" (1 Cor. 6:3), says the apostle. "Know ye not that the saints shall judge the world?" (v. 2). It is tremendous. This is the calling of sons in Christ.

But the realisation of this dominion, this heavenly calling, is not without warfare. It is not just going to happen. It is the occasion of a terrific warfare, and that warfare is not just something that goes on. Do not get the abstract mental conception of there being a war on and somehow or other we have got something to do with it, and we call ourselves soldiers and sing hymns about it. It is something very much more than that, as many of you know. It is not something just objective and abstract. It is something which involves us and demands of us a very real training in understanding, in knowledge, in tactics, and in everything that has to do with war. If it is sons who are to inherit with Christ, we know well by now that sonship is an ultimate thought. It is the issue of some process, and so, as we are being trained as sons, we are being trained in war, for that is a way of the inheritance of sons. It is warfare.

Now, it says here that David was a man of war. Weigh the words well - a man of war. His manhood was such. That was what David was. It was not something that he took on and assumed. He was that, he was a fighter - not that he loved a fight for fighting's sake, not that he was trained in a military school and therefore it had become a kind of second nature to him to fight. That was not true, and it was certainly not true that he had a great deal of superfluous energy for which he found relief in a fight. There are a lot of people like that and they think they are good fighters. That is not the basis of this thing at all. I am not saying these things just for something to say. They lie behind this whole matter of warfare. You may not, by nature, be a fighter. You may have no natural inclination for fighting, no appetite for a fight, and certainly you may not feel qualified and trained for it. You are not exempt on any of those grounds. You are, whether you like it or not, involved in warfare; it is a part of your calling. Your destiny and your inheritance lie along this line. So we have to look deeper to see what it was that made David a man of war, because if we can put our finger upon that, we shall see exactly what will make us warriors. It will be exactly the same thing in us as in him.

David's Jealousy for the Rights of God

What was it really that made David a man of war? In the first place, quite clearly, it was indignation for the rights of God and for the rights of God's people; a real sense of personal responsibility for the interests of God in His people. That is how it worked out in the first place in very simple forms. That sense of responsibility showed itself in battle. It showed itself in secret, and remember what we said earlier about this, because all the fighting is not done in public. We do not begin to be fighters in public. We are that, and therefore it goes on when no one is watching. I am referring to his encounters with the lion and the bear. David, away there in the seclusion and isolation of the fields of Bethlehem, where no eye was upon him as far as he knew, where no one could take account of his procedure and therefore no one would have been able to spread abroad a tale of his cowardice, by this sense of responsibility took on a lion and a bear for the sake of a lamb. I take it that his father Jesse was a man of some large competence and possessions. He sent very bountiful gifts to his other sons in the army, and what is one lamb? The lion could have that! But no, it was a lamb, and it belonged to his father and it belonged to his flock and it was a part of his responsibility. His responsibility came down to a single lamb. And that sense of responsibility for a very small thing led him out to something which involved his whole life, for, as we said before, it is no small thing to take on a lion. Neither is it a small thing to take on a bear. This tremendous undertaking, involving so much risk, so much courage, was brought right down to a very small question. "He that is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much" (Luke 16:10). That is the story of David's life: faithful for a little lamb, and you shall be trusted with a whole nation.

But to go back. It was there behind the scenes that David was led out and exercised by this sense of responsibility. It was that that made him the man of war. No, let us repeat, not because he liked fighting, nor because he was so despised, nor for any other reason. But you see it when he came out to his first big fight, with the giant. It was this indignation for God's rights and God's rights in His people. The man is just stirred to his depths by this thing. "Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?" (1 Sam. 17:26). Indignation. How his soul was stirred by this sense of responsibility. This is what makes warriors. In proportion to that consciousness and that sense, we shall fight the Lord's battles or we shall not fight them. We can hear those words of another great warrior: "Knowing that I am set for the defence of the gospel" (Phil. 1:16). Paul and David were jealous over God's interests.

Faithfulness in Small Things

Now let me first of all repeat: it begins often in very small ways. If you are looking for and waiting for great opportunities, waiting for the day of a great work to do for the Lord, what you call your "life work", and you are thinking in terms of something big, let me tell you that there is a law established by God, and you will not be able to get out of it. You may put yourself into something that you think big, and you may create for yourself something that you think big, and organise a big movement and be the centre of it. In the long run it may be that that, after all, in its intrinsic value was very small. Not all that looks so big, immense, and extensive, is counting in that intrinsic way. Oh yes, after a year or two or a time, so much of it has fallen away and cannot be found. God's principle holds. It is one of the laws that He has established. Like all the laws of nature, you can observe them or you can violate them, and you do not get away with it. You just cannot hoodwink God, even in the laws of nature, so do not deceive yourself if you are expecting or looking for some large sphere and opportunity of service. Do remember this law: it will come by way of faithfulness in the small things. It may be a very small thing, a very menial thing, it may be just one lamb, and you might be disposed to undervalue, underrate it, despise it, and think that it does not represent enough to justify all your life and energy and thought. But David put his life into the saving of that lamb, and if he was the sensible man that we are going to see that he was, he did not do this presumptuously or rashly. He knew what he was doing, and it was a life for a life with him, and there would have been no more afterwards, no more life for a young man. He put it all into this little thing, and our whole life may hang upon some small thing, our whole life of service for God may be bound up with faithfulness in something very small, something that we might easily despise and think it is not worth our while. That is very searching, but it is very true, and the Lord has brought some of us down there. He will not let us get on and away until this thing has been the scene and the occasion of a complete and utter abandonment to the Lord on that.

But this works out in so many ways. Do not get the objective picture. It comes very near home - a sense of responsibility for the Lord's interests. What a lot of ground that covers. Take the matter of the fellowship of the Lord's people. Has not the Lord got a tremendous interest bound up with the fellowship of His people, the relatedness of His children, their oneness? That represents a tremendous thing for the Lord. You see, all Calvary was focussed upon that thing, because disintegration, disruption, and the breakup of human relationships was the result of Satan's work, and the Son of man was manifested to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8). The wonderful thing is, immediately Calvary is over, you find that a scattered and disintegrated company is in one Man; the mighty victory of the Cross. Be tremendously jealous over this matter of fellowship, of relatedness, and take responsibility. That is real warrior spirit. That is entering into the fight.

When I see people in a corner talking under their breath about things or people in the fellowship, and as I sense something that is not happy, not good, something that they would not like to say openly and be heard saying, I say those are people who are never going to count in the great issue. This is detracting from the glory of God, this is taking something from the Lord. Be careful what you lend your ears to. Be careful if there is something of a grievance, a disaffection, because that can lead to an undoing of things, a letting down of things, a bringing in of something, such as some root of bitterness. Though you may understand that that person has a lot on their side, be careful. You are in danger of opening the door to the devil if you take it on in sympathy, listen to it, and take sides against someone else. This is a battle with the powers of evil, this matter of fellowship.

We have got to take responsibility for the Body of Christ and fight its battles. We could pursue that in many directions and many connections. But you see the point from what I have said. The enemy is always trying to bring in his victory and the defeat of Christ along the line of whisperings, mutterings, murmurings and complainings. The church at Corinth, as we have said before, had no glory in it, no song, no joy, for this very reason. And so the apostle, writing, brought in Israel's calamitous end in the wilderness, "They were overthrown in the wilderness... neither murmur ye, as some of them murmured" (1 Cor. 10:5,10). Murmuring, that is all. They lost the inheritance, and the Lord lost His inheritance, by murmuring. Beware of your murmuring. You may think there is something to murmur about, but the enemy would like to get us murmuring, complaining, criticising. The point is, 'Now then, what is going to be the issue of this? Is this going to work out for the glory of God? Is this going to bring the inheritance in to the Lord? Is this the way of sonship, or is this something else?' It becomes a matter of personal responsibility for all, this is the testimony of Jesus. We like that phrase, 'the testimony', and we use it. But what is the testimony? Is it some conception of truth, some system of interpretation of Christianity, some wonderful vision in the abstract? No! The testimony is what Jesus fought for and battled through to in His cross. We are brought into that battle which involves jealousy for the true nature of the Lord's interests.

I have spoken about Corinthians. I pass in mind to Galatians. You know that the Galatian letter sets forth the pulling of things down out of the heavenlies onto the earth, out of the spiritual into the temporal, out of the eternal into the merely now. Paul was the man of the heavenly vision. With that vision he had gone to Galatia. Those believers had come into their relationship with Christ on heavenly ground, and the Judaizers had followed up and pulled them out of their heavenly position, brought them down to mere ordinances and rites and Old Testament legality, and Paul is on the warpath. If ever Paul's soul was stirred to battle, it was over the Galatian situation. His jealousy came to white heat. I am not exaggerating. As he repeats twice, "Though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach unto you any gospel other than that which we preached unto you, let him be anathema. As we have said before, so say I now again... let him be anathema." That is his jealousy at white heat for the true, spiritual, heavenly nature of things as opposed to religion that is merely traditional and formal. It is a battle. What a battle it was for Paul!

Warriorship Demands Utter Selflessness

Such warriorship, to be such a man of war, makes one inclusive demand. It demands utter selflessness. If you are going to think about your own skin, interests, future, position, and anything that has to do with you, you will not tackle a lion or a bear, and you will certainly not tackle Galatia. The utter selflessness of this man! How all self-interest and consideration was swamped and overwhelmed by this concern and jealousy for the Lord. We have got to be in this with our lives.

I cannot help quoting again and again those things which seem to me to get so much to the point. Yesterday I cited Paul in this way. "As always, so now... Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether by life, or by death" (Phil. 1:20). 'I am all in this. If I perish, I perish, but here goes, I am in it; this one thing I do...'. Dear friends, spiritual warfare, prompted by this sense of responsibility, does demand an utter selflessness. A person who has a personal interest of any kind will find themselves entirely incapable, and all others will find them entirely incapable, of effecting anything in spiritual warfare. They are of the divided heart. They have got something else that is keeping them out of the war. They may think they are in it and they may have a go at it, but nothing comes of it. They may use the language, the phraseology of war, and so on, but nothing happens. They are beating the air. The same is true of anybody who has a personal problem.

If you have a personal problem of a spiritual character, you are out of the fight. Oh, how the devil loves to bring in personal, spiritual problems, and I think he does it most with people who are the most dangerous people to his kingdom. If only that man or that woman could get away from their own spiritual problem, how they would count for the Lord, how they would register. They would mean something tremendous; but they are all tied up, locked up, by this personal spiritual problem. It may be as to their acceptance with the Lord, as to the Lord's attitude to them, it may be anything like that. You may make tremendous attempts at fighting, but until you have settled that spiritual problem, you will effect nothing in the battle. The enemy has caused us to be flung into the vortex of a great difficulty, perplexity and problem, dominated by a big 'Why' where the Lord is concerned. Those have been the times when we could not fight, when we effected nothing. It will always be like that. We have to get over our problems, to get clear of these spiritual matters, if we are going to count.

Warriorship Begins with Worship

This is all in such accurate sequence. David's warfare as a man of valour and a man of war began with his worship. The singing part came first. And true singing, the right kind of singing, if it is singing that is from the heart, means that we are beautifully free from ourselves. That is what singing ought to mean. It does not always mean that, but that is what it ought to mean. We sing because we are delivered from ourselves. Worship comes first, and what does worship mean? Well, it is all the Lord, not myself, not my problem, my circumstances, my difficulty, it is the Lord; my heart is towards the Lord. When it is like that, we can be fighters, and only if it is like that shall we really be fighters. So it comes back to a very practical point.

Very often the first battle and the first phase of the warfare and of every fresh battle and every fresh skirmish, is the battle in our own hearts to let go to the Lord. It is probably the most difficult battle you and I and all Christian people have to fight, to know how to let go to the Lord. We will hold on, we have got our teeth in and we are not letting this thing go, we are not giving this thing up. We believe with all our might that this is the will of God and this is what the Lord means, but you know, there is that in the Word of God which shows us that we are not to personally hold on to the things of the Lord.

Abraham and Isaac are the great outstanding illustration in the Old Testament. God gave Isaac when he was utterly impossible. By a miracle, a mighty intervention, Isaac was given to Abraham and then the Lord said, 'Take him and offer him.' What a problem for Abraham! If he had liked to have had a problem, if he wanted to have a problem, he had got one, and that could have been nursed for ever and paralysed him completely. He went through on the great fighting art of letting go to God. It is a tremendous thing to be able to let go to God, even to hand back to the Lord what He has given you, what you believe to be of Him, to say, 'Now, Lord, I let go, I am not going to have my own way about this, I hand this back to You; if You want this, then You see to it that it is established, that it is done; I have no question whatever about it that it was of You, but I just hand it over to You.'

There is such a lot of personal holding on, even to the things of the Lord, and making them ours, our bit of work, our sphere, our line of things. Oh, this personal jealousy for what we call the interests of the Lord, but after all we have turned His interests to our own. Have you learned the mighty victory of letting go to God? It means handing it all up, standing back, being in that detached position where you are quite ready that it shall never come back if the Lord does not want it, but if it is to be of the Lord He shall do it, and you will not. That makes warriors.

You find that not once nor twice you have to fight that battle, but you learn life lessons along that line. You come to the place where you say, 'I know, I have learned that to hold on is to lose, to hold on is defeat, to hold on myself with my own strength of will, mastery and determination is to be put out of the fight, to be rendered useless. And the days and the weeks and the months and the years are passing by, and the real work of the Lord is not being done because I have held this so much to myself, even the thing which I believed to be of God.' That is a lesson that you must learn: how to let go to the Lord. I would like to pursue that thought through David's life, because it came out more than once, how, when it was in his power to do something he stood back, and said, 'I am not putting my hand on that; I am leaving that to the Lord.' A man of war. Along that line you attain to the glory in sonship. That is the way.

We just touch on these things, briefly and imperfectly and incompletely. Remember, the way of sonship, God's inheritance, is the way of a grim and terrific warfare, but it comes down to light on what we may call small practical matters in life. It involves us in the whole question of our zeal and our sense of responsibility. Oh, may I make that appeal? May I stress that? Do ask the Lord to give you an adequate, sufficient sense of responsibility for His interests, that you become responsible people and you are not going to have anything that militates against the interests of the Lord.

Chapter 8 - "A Man of Good Presence"

This message is one of a series for the purpose of speaking to the people of God about His thoughts for them. This time I attempt to interweave the message to Christians with the gospel to the unsaved, or I turn aside for that purpose in particular at some point. I am going on, of course, with the message of the conference, but perhaps this will prove to be the most extraordinary text ever taken for the gospel. We find it in that very same verse of 1 Samuel 16. I am going to skip one clause and hold that over till later and take the one which follows it. The verse as a whole reads like this, "Then answered one of the young men, and said, Behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, that is skilful in playing, and a mighty man of valour, and a man of war, and prudent in speech, and a comely person; and the Lord is with him" (v. 18). For now, I am leaving the phrase "and prudent in speech", and taking the next: "a comely person". I am quite sure you have never heard the gospel preached on that! It is, however, a very unfortunate translation. It would be more accurately translated, and indeed I think quite accurately translated, "a person of good presence" - a description of David. This verse contains the many-sided introduction of this young man David, and it is impressive and remarkable to note how every one of these clauses, or these descriptions, worked out to be true to the full in the whole life of David.

God's Ideal for Man

"A comely man" or "a man of good presence". From one standpoint the whole Bible turns upon a man. It begins with "Let us make man." This psalmist, David, gives utterance to those wonderful words which had a range so far beyond his own consciousness when he uttered them, as in Psalm 8 - "What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that Thou visitest him? For Thou hast made him but little lower than the angels, and crownest him with glory and honour. Thou makest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands" (v. 4-6). We saw earlier how those words proved to be prophetic, a pointer to the Lord Jesus. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews attaches them to Christ, to those sons being brought to glory, partners in that heavenly calling, to have the throne of glory with Him, to reign with Him. The whole course of God's activities through the ages is to secure sons for glory, and to train them as sons for the purposes of reigning in glory and manifesting His glory in the ages to come. He is securing those sons by new birth, bringing men and women into that new life in Christ which Christ called being "born again", or "born from above". Securing them, He institutes a lifelong process of forming them as sons. The apostle calls that conforming them to the image of His Son, and all with the view to bringing them to full stature, the full measure, of Christ.

So God has no place for dwarfs. God has no place for deformed people. God has no place for people with a blemish or an eccentricity. Of course, I am not speaking naturally, I am speaking in spiritual terms. What God has in view is perfect men and women, perfect in the sense that there is no arrest about their development, there is no deformity in their lives, their characters, their make-up, there is no blemish upon them to mar their beauty and their glory. There is nothing about them eccentric and singular, as making them something that is not normal. God's idea of a normal man and woman is that they should be whole, complete. Now, that is what He is working towards, that is what is in His mind whenever He gets hold of a life. His intention is to make that man and that woman complete, whole, perfect, so that ultimately His own glory can shine out through such.

Man As He Is Apart from God

Man by nature is anything but that. The Bible gives us a terrible picture of man. You will not believe it, because you will not see your own likeness as you look at it, but there it is. The Bible's picture and view of man is of something which has been arrested in its growth, stunted in its development, something which is twisted and deformed, something which, on top of that, is blind, and further it is palsied, lame, deaf, deceived, and devil-dominated. You do not believe that of yourself, but that is God's picture of man by nature. You say, 'Not any one of those things is true of man really - that he is stunted and arrested in his development' the Bible says he is. There may be kinds of development in human life, but history shows (and the longer we live we come to prove) that there is a terrible throw-back to the barbarous side of human nature in spite of all its civilisation, education, science and so-called progress. It throws back continually to the most ghastly and awful things conceivable; what man can do to man in a day like this. He is arrested in some part of his being. Somehow in his nature he is still dwarfed and stunted.

Now, how can we prove that? On what ground? Well, it is very simple. I might take you onto a ladder that is going to reach up very high to some steeple, some very high place, and as you begin to go up, your knees begin to tremble and your hands begin to get very wobbly and unsteady, and I say to you, 'You are like a man with a palsy, you are all shaky, you are not steady, you had better come down.' And I take you down and do something to you, do something in you, and then say, 'Now then, up again' and you go - no trembling, no shaking, no feebleness, straight, strong, up to the top. You come down and you say, 'Before that happened to me, I was like a man with a palsy, I could not walk straight, I could not walk steady, I would not have believed I was such a hopeless kind of creature until I became something else.'

Take the blind. I may take you into some place, take you in again and again, and you come out, but after you have been in and out for a long time, one day, I take you in and I say, 'Have you ever seen this?' You look and then I begin to describe in such a way that you are able to see that. You say, 'I never saw that before. Until you did that something to me which gave me the opening of my eyes, I was a blind man.' And so you could go on over this matter of being stunted and dwarfed.

Christians know quite well what I am talking about, how limited we were, how tied up, how little we were, and then something happened, and we look back and say, 'Was it ever possible that I should have been such a little, contemptible, small thing as I was? Somehow or other, I have been tremendously enlarged. I only began to grow at that time.' You see what I mean. Something happens, and it is true, whether you feel a dwarf or not, by nature you are. Something has come in to arrest your development, and you will never develop in that inward way unless that mighty something happens. There is no evolution in that realm. You just do not grow up into all God's thought naturally. Something has to happen to release you from an arrest.

And it is true in all these other things. Christians know what it is to be able to hear what they never could hear before, to see what they never could see before, to come into a life of fulness of which they had no conception before, to be able to walk and to do what was utterly impossible before. What has happened?

The Lord Jesus Makes Man Whole

Do you know the meaning of that word 'salvation'? Just making whole. The Lord Jesus came into this world and as He passed down the way, here is a blind man, and there is a deaf man, and there is a palsied man, and there is a lame man, and there is a devil-ridden man, and every other kind is in that way, and as He passed on He left them all whole men; they were saved. The effect of Jesus Christ is to save in this sense of making men whole.

A Man After God's Own Heart

Now you come back to David. David was said to be a man after God's own heart. He answered to God's idea, not perfectly, but in some very real respects, those which matter most to God, which to God are features and characteristic of a son, of sonship. What were the things in David that answered to God's heart? In other words, what were some of the marks of David's greatness so that it was said of him that he was a man of good presence, a man who could be looked upon and admired, looked upon with great respect and admiration, so that from God's standpoint it could be said, 'That is a man indeed'. What were some of the marks of that greatness of spiritual stature which characterised David?

The Quality of Meekness

I will tell you what God regards as marks of greatness, what in God's presence is something acceptable, what it is that makes a man or a woman of 'good presence'. The first outstanding thing, I think probably the most outstanding thing about David, was his meekness. Many of you here who know your Bibles know what a tremendous store God lays by meekness, what a first and high place God gives to meekness. "To this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit" (Isa. 66:2). Meekness, but what does that mean? Well, it just means self-emptiness, and self-emptiness by being emptied. By nature we are not empty, we have to be emptied. One of the things which God attends to very carefully to get to sonship is our emptying. Take comfort and encouragement from that, for it is on the way to the glory to be emptied. The great Son of God went that way. The apostle says, "He emptied Himself... Wherefore also God highly exalted Him" (Phil. 2:7,9).

The way to the exaltation is the way of the emptying. We cannot empty ourselves, but when we come to the Lord He begins this terrible process of emptying us of ourselves to make room for Himself, and that emptiness of self is the essence of meekness. David never claimed to be as good as the other man. He always thought himself to be the worst of men. Read his psalms. There are psalms in which David gives expression to his own conception of himself which are abject and miserable. His meekness was like that. He always regarded himself as being poorer stuff than other men, never as good as the other man. That was his meekness. God looks in that direction and says, 'That is a man after My heart.'

Oh, you know quite well that when God was here in the flesh in the Person of His Son, the one thing which caused Him to express loathing, was self-righteousness, self-sufficiency, and pride. The most scathing or injuring things that ever passed the lips of the Son of God were directed towards that kind of thing where men were making a great deal of themselves and parading before others their own goodness and righteousness and importance; the value of themselves in their own eyes. The Lord Jesus put that sort of thing in a very great contrast. There went a Pharisee and a publican up to the temple to pray. The Pharisee, ostensibly talking to God but really talking over his shoulder to the poor publican, said, "God, I thank Thee, that..." and the one thing about that man was "I" - in the presence of God! The Lord Jesus said the other man dared not even lift his eyes to heaven, and said, "God, be Thou merciful to me a sinner." The Lord Jesus said that that was the man that went to his home justified. This was a very strong way of putting His seal upon self-emptiness, meekness. It is the direction in which God looks. David was like that.

His meekness worked out in many other ways; among them, see how he suffered intensely when he went wrong. Never for a moment did he excuse himself. Never for a moment did he blame someone else. Never for a moment did he justify himself, but condemned himself outright. Some of these psalms are really psalms from a broken heart because it has failed God. David sinned, yes, David sinned. But if ever a man suffered agonies for his sin, David did, and if ever a man was filled to overflowing with the consciousness of the utter mercy of God to a sinner, that man was David, and that is his meekness. Anything but meekness always finds some excuse or some scapegoat, someone to blame, or makes less of it than it is, but meekness goes down on its face in broken-heartedness over all failure, because it knows that it hurts God.

See again how he suffered reproach without vindictiveness. It is a mark of meekness to suffer wholly unjustly, to be cruelly treated, viciously assailed, robbed and deprived of everything in this life, home and family and everything else. See how he suffers it without any vindictiveness. There is no revenge about David. Here is this man Saul occupying the place of the throne and seeking to make David's life an utter martyrdom, and on his trail to kill him, and that went on, not for a little while, but for years. And more than once that man Saul was put into David's hands. He just caught him, so to speak, red-handed. His own friends said, 'Look here, now is your chance to rid yourself of this life enemy, to finish the whole thing', and mark you, they said, 'The Lord has put him into your hand, you can do this with a good conscience, surely the Lord has brought this about.' But no, David said, "The Lord forbid that I should put forth my hand against the Lord's anointed" (1 Sam. 26:11), and let him go, not once. And then at length the Lord did the thing. In battle Saul died a terrible death on the high field, and what did David do? Did he gloat, did he sigh a sigh of relief, did he say, 'Thank the Lord he is dead and out of the way, I will never again be bothered by him'? One of the most heartrending, heart-touching things in the whole Bible is David's lament over Saul, his most beautiful words of genuine grief over Saul and over Jonathan his son. And that was not all.

We know the story of Jonathan and David's attachment, but Jonathan did take sides with his father, and go into battle with him to the end. That may have been very noble, but you know, a little man would have been piqued over Jonathan. If David had been a little man like some people, he would have had a grudge against Jonathan. He would have said: 'He had a chance of standing by me. He knew quite well what his father was after, to take my life, but he stayed with his father.' He might have felt very sore about that, but here when Jonathan and his father Saul are slain in battle, what did David do afterwards? He searches the country and says, "Is there yet any that is left of the house of Saul, that I may show him kindness for Jonathan's sake?" (2 Sam. 9:1). 'Find me anybody, if I can do them a good turn for Jonathan's sake.' There was no sign of pique or ill-feeling about that, was there? He is a big man, yes, a man of presence indeed. This is meekness. There was nothing small, contemptible or mean about him.

Wealth Accumulated for the House of God

Another thing that made David great (in this connection I prefer the word 'big') and made him a big man in the right, true sense, is the way in which he accumulated wealth for the house of God. I shall probably touch upon that again later, but there is one aspect of that that I will mention now. We have already hinted at it - how David took hold of every experience of suffering and sorrow, and wrung out of it something for God and God's people. Did he go into a deep and dark experience? He has taken hold of that deep and dark experience and given something to all the generations to follow for their enrichment. Whatever it was, David's attitude was: 'There is something in this that I can turn to account for the generations to come to the glory of God, for the good of God's people.' That is how we came by our Psalter. You know that is not the little person's way of looking at their troubles.

Troubles usually turn us in on ourselves and tie us up and lock us up in ourselves. We begin to develop that awful disease of self-pity, for that is what it is. It is a malignant disease. We draw a little fence round ourselves and live within that little world of our own trouble, and we get more and more sour. That is how little people react in their troubles. But here is a man who knew something, perhaps only a faint taste, but to him it was an awful thing, of what the great Son of God knew on the cross when He cried as in the words of Psalm 22 - "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" Just a taste of a sense of forsakenness. It was not real forsakenness, as the rest of the psalm shows. A little later on David came back from that, and simply said that the Lord had not left him, but it seemed like it; but for all time and for all posterity out of that deep and terrible experience of seeming forsakenness of God, David has given a heritage to the people of God and to the glory of God.

The point is that his attitude towards suffering was this: there is something in this that can work out for the good of God's people and the glory of God. To take an attitude like that towards adversity and suffering requires character; it is bigness.

A Unifying Passion

One other thing I would point out about David as a feature of his spiritual and moral greatness, was how he was dominated by a single unifying passion. His whole being was unified by this passion. Just look at those words of his in Psalm 69:6-8: "Let not them that wait for Thee be put to shame through me, O Lord God of hosts: let not those that seek Thee be brought to dishonour through me, O God of Israel. Because for Thy sake I have borne reproach; shame hath covered my face. I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my mother's children. For the zeal of Thy house hath eaten me up." What is all the trouble about? Why all this suffering, reproach, and ostracism? "The zeal of Thy house hath eaten me up." And you know that those words were taken up as a prophecy and applied to the Lord Jesus. They saw Him go into the temple court. Finding there the merchants making merchandise of holy things in the precincts of the house of God, His jealousy for His Father's honour roused Him, and He made a whip of cords, and went in and drove them all out, and overturned their tables and said, "Take these things hence; make not My Father's house a house of merchandise" (John 2:16), and those looking on caught up this word from Psalm 69. It says, "His disciples remembered that it was written, Zeal for Thy house shall eat me up" (v. 17). What does that represent? Well, a unifying passion, His whole life gathered into one object: the glory of His Father, the glory of God, causing Him to be watchful and alert for anything that would bring dishonour to His Father. It says that He went in and looked round and then He went away, and then He came back. He had been on the alert, He had been watchful, taking account, taking in the situation. He came back to deal with it. Watchfulness concerning anything that would bring dishonour to His Father, a mighty concern for His Father's honour and glory, and then a tremendous courage to carry out His concern and His watchfulness into effect.

David was like that. I cannot turn you to the large amount that there is in the books of Samuel and of Chronicles about David's concern for the house of God. We shall touch on that again probably. But there it was, one unifying passion. His life was a unity, his life was a singleness of motive and object, and that made him great, and it always does. It is a mark of greatness. This is spiritual quality, making a man of presence.

The Power of the Indwelling Spirit

But, having said it all, we need to be helped there, and so we take another picture, or two other pictures, twin pictures, the negative and the positive. Look into your gospels and see the picture of the disciples of our Lord there. In the gospels they are little men. If there is anything that marks littleness, it is jealousy. A big person knows no jealousy or envying. Rivalry, trying to outdo one another, to get the advantage of one another, is a mark of littleness. There is pride, and a tremendous amount of self-sufficiency. They are little men in the gospels. I am sorry to have to say that about disciples of the Lord, but there they are. But see them after the Holy Spirit had come and taken possession of them. Now there is no trace of any of those things. All jealousy, envy, rivalry and pride has gone. They are different men. They were cringing little men before, cowards, and afraid, running for their lives. See them now! They stand up before rulers; they now have the spirit of courage, boldness. They are not intimidated by all the threats. They are on top of the situation, they are big men now.

What has done it? The same thing as will do it with you and with me. Just exactly the same mighty power is for us as they came to know: the Spirit of the Lord, the Holy Spirit, coming to indwell, deals with all our littleness. A Spirit-possessed, a Spirit-indwelt, Spirit-governed man or woman will not remain indefinitely small. If we are small, if there is jealousy, envy, pride, rivalry, cowardice, if there is anything like this that speaks of little spiritual stature, and that goes on too long, it declares that you and I, if we are like that, are knowing all too little about life in the Spirit. It just happens. You do not have to do anything about it. When the Spirit of Christ comes in, it changes, it releases. It cuts that hold to limitation, and you begin to grow and be enlarged and become something, while not of self-importance - no, never - you become something to be reckoned with.

Now, whatever we are by nature, we may be little, we may be all that I have said by nature, we may literally be poor specimens of humanity, but remember when the Holy Spirit gets into a life, the least one becomes significant, the least one takes on a new meaning. It is the wonder of the gospel, it is the wonder of salvation. It makes us whole. It is the wonder of what Christ does in a life. It lifts it right out of its insignificance and begins to make it something that matters, a man or a woman of presence.

You know that when you meet a person in whom Christ is really having His way, whatever they may be naturally - unlearned, uneducated, untrained or everything else at a disadvantage - you meet someone who counts and in heaven's eyes counts more than all the noble of this world. That is the way in which God comes into His glory. God does not get any glory out of our littleness, however it is expressed, out of our jealousies and rivalries and envies, all that sort of thing. When we grow spiritually and leave those childish things behind, then the glory of God begins to be seen in us. When we are fully grown at last, sons of the living God in full realisation, there will be a fulness of glory.

You know what the last picture of the Bible is, it is the City of God, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven. You know that all that is in that book of the Revelation is symbolic, and that City is a type or a symbol of the people of God, the church, this sonship in full realisation. But you notice two things about it: it is very big, it is immense, and it is very magnificent, it is very beautiful. And the beautiful thing about it is this, that on the foundations of its marvellous wall are written the names of the twelve apostles - those men who once quarrelled, who entered into those rivalries, envied one another, tried to outdo one another, those men who forsook Him and fled and ran for their lives. Here are their names on the most costly things. Look again at those foundations. Look at that wall, the foundations of which are adorned with precious stones, and the names of these men. What God has wrought! What God can do! This is not just imaginary now, this is not some beautiful idea. It is what God is working for with you and with me, to bring in the preciousness of His Son in terms of sonship, by our enlargement, our spiritual enlargement.

Chapter 9 - "Prudent in Matters"

"Then answered one of the young men, and said, Behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, that is skilful in playing, and a mighty man of valour, and a man of war, and prudent in speech, and a comely person; and the Lord is with him" (1 Sam. 16:18).

In the previous chapter we took the phrase "and a comely person". Now we revert to the one which we left out, and the Revised Version says, "prudent in speech", with two marginal notes, "skilful in business", very much better and truer to the original word. The Authorised Version reads: "prudent in matters", and here that version seems to get really nearer the original than the others. That word 'matters' occurs many times in the Old Testament, and we can get to this aspect of David's life and character by just taking a glance at one of its early occurrences.

You will remember that when Moses seemed to be rather overwhelmed with all the problems and all the affairs that people were bringing to him for counsel and decision, his father-in-law hit upon a worldly-wise course of meeting the difficulty. He advised his son-in-law that he should no longer take it all on himself, but that he should select other men to deal with minor things. Then he said "every great matter they shall bring unto thee" (Ex. 18:22), and that is the same word here. A man prudent in matters, or skilful in matters. That is better than prudent in speech, but that may be included. So we get to the heart of this particular feature of David's life.

David was, therefore, a man of discretion, a man of good judgment, a man of intelligence, a man of wise counsel, and you will already see what an important feature of true sonship that is. If sonship according to the Word of God is the development of the children of God to full stature, then of course the whole question of intelligence, wisdom, good judgment and discretion becomes one of real importance, and if David's life really was realised in his son Solomon then it is all of a piece with this. Solomon is the synonym for wisdom. His fame and his kingdom rested upon his wisdom. He was the very embodiment of wisdom. The chief feature of his glory was his wisdom. They came from the ends of the earth, not to hear, but to see the wisdom of Solomon, and that is a very real distinction. To hear the wisdom of anyone is one thing, but to see it may be quite another. The Queen of Sheba came to see the wisdom of Solomon. Wisdom is always the practical aspect of things. We come to that again later.

Wisdom Indispensable to Government

Now then, the end must be brought to the beginning, and govern everything from the beginning. The end, we have seen, in the purpose of God is a company of sons in His Son in the place of government, to rule with Christ throughout the ages of the ages. And rulership or government demands (perhaps more than anything else) wisdom. It is indispensable to government, and if the object is to turn everything to the glory of God, that requires a lot of wisdom, intelligence and discretion. These are the things clearly bound up with David and the issue of his life in Solomon, and are but foreshadowings, in a very limited way, of David's greater Son, and of that House and that Kingdom of the Son of God's love into which we are called.

Now, if this is true (and do not take it as just some beautiful Bible theme, some subject or topic) there is no doubt that many of you do not feel that you dare aspire to anything so high, but I do want you to remember that it is from the lowly places that God has always taken His princes, kings and rulers, and that is something which holds good. You and I in ourselves might never allow ourselves to think in terms of reigning with Christ for ever and ever in this sense of government. Perhaps we have just superficially accepted the idea contained in the words: "If we endure, we shall also reign with Him" (2 Tim. 2:12). That means being in heaven in glory and sharing His reign in some way, being in it, subjects of His great Kingship and Kingdom. But we have never gone the next step, that we also are to govern with Him; we are to be kings with the King of kings. That is in principle our vocation throughout the ages to come. The government of this universe is going to rest with the sons of God.

If I were to diverge for a moment, I could show that to be just the meaning of everything that is in the Bible. It was to that government in the place of God's Son that Lucifer, Satan, aspired to take the kingdom and the throne, and he is still after it and fighting for it, although it is a losing battle. But he has gained the place around this world. He is in a sense the prince of this world. He does influence and affect the course of this world. This world does lie in the Wicked One. Things of this world are being very largely actuated by those evil forces which have taken the place of Christ in this world and this world system. But the Bible makes it perfectly clear that the day is coming when there will be no more place found for them in heaven, but their place will be taken from them and then it will be that the new Jerusalem, the heavenly city, the people of God, will occupy that position of government. And although it sounds a little fantastic and remote, it is true that if we come to sonship in very truth, we shall be doing then what the powers of evil are doing now in this world, but doing it on very different lines, to very different conclusions. But that is the heavenly calling, that is the eternal vocation of the church, and it is unto that that all our training as sons is leading, and in that training we have to be trained to rule. That calls for a great deal of intelligence and good judgment and discretion, so that we are now in the school of kings and rulers, and in this matter of being prudent in matters or skillful in business there are some things which have got to be settled before we shall get very far in our education. That is, before we shall advance in sonship, there are some things which are basically essential, and we have to get those settled right away.

The Need for Teachableness

And the first thing is this: the absolute necessity of teachableness. In all the qualities of David, that one is outstanding. David was among the most teachable of men. If Solomon, the full fruit of David's life, is going to be the greatest teacher - and he is referred to as the wise man - all his proverbs and his songs, the product of his wisdom, came from the teachableness of his father. This is an indispensable thing in anyone who is coming to spiritual government. Of all people who are hopeless in this realm, the self-sufficient are the most hopeless. The person who knows it all, or thinks he or she knows it all, and can do it, is the person who is going to be left in God's contempt apart.

Some of you may have felt at times that God can make no use of you because you lack certain qualifications. You do not have natural gifts, nor training, education, status, nor any of those things which men regard as necessary for a qualified person. Therefore you have felt that you must be, so to speak, on the shelf in God's workshop, of little use, with very little prospect. Now, do not believe that. If in God's great, universal workshop there were things on the shelf which God had put there and left there and was taking no notice of, they were just in His contempt. Apart they would be the things which thought they could do it, that they knew all about it. There is so much in the Scripture which is the very inheritance of the people who think nothing of themselves.

God has so many promises for the meek. "The meek will He guide in justice; and the meek will He teach His way" (Ps. 25:9). There you are. This is the way of sonship, and meekness is just that you have no opinion of yourself and that you have no self-sufficiency whatsoever. You do not think that you know, and you do not think that you can do it. There are many people who are too clever for the Lord. The Lord is not looking for cleverness at all. Indeed, He overlooks cleverness. See Christ's premium upon teachableness. Mary stands out as the great vessel of glory in this. "Mary hath chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her" (Luke 10:42). She was the one who was teachable, the one who was conscious, on the one hand, of her own need of being taught, and on the other hand of how much the Lord had to teach her, what He had to give, and the Lord puts a premium upon teachableness, He puts His seal upon that. It is a tremendous thing to Him. So this is the beginning of sonship towards this great end. You lay this to heart.

The fact remains that the Lord can never get anywhere with anybody until He has prepared them for it, and the Lord's preparations for everything further are in the direction of a newly created and deepened sense of need. However much there has been, He brings us to the place where quite honestly we know that that, great as it has been, is not sufficient for the new situation. We cannot just trade upon the past. We must have something fresh from the Lord for the new situation, and we are down on our faces as though we had never had anything or known anything. The Lord moves on that way, and teaches us wonderful lessons.

The Need for Adjustability

The second thing which comes alongside of teachableness is adjustability, that we are amenable to discipline, to correction, and are quite ready and prepared to adjust when the Lord corrects. There are many who are not prepared to be corrected, especially if the Lord does His correcting through some person here. And do not forget that the Lord does not send angels from heaven to correct us. His angels are the people around us in this matter, and very often the people from whom we would not be prepared to take correction. The Lord tests us on this matter so often by the means that He uses for our correction. If only a glorious angel could come and tell us where we are wrong, of course, it would be easy, not difficult at all. If only the Lord Himself would come straight to us and speak into our ears and tell us about it, well then, we should not have such difficulty, but it is a very different thing when the Lord comes by other means; then, so often, any kind of correction, being put right, having our faults, mistakes and lack of wisdom pointed out to us, leads us to go off in a huff. We sulk for days until the thing wears itself out and we get into a better mood, but that is a poor way of growing. Adjustability is a very important thing, that we can be corrected, we can be put right. We should be ready and only too glad if people will show us where we are wrong and thank them for doing so. That is the way of spiritual growth.

This comes out in David so clearly. It is possible to do a right thing with a right motive in a wrong way, and to come to trouble. But very few people who have sought to do the right thing with the right motive, and have come into difficulty, are prepared to think the thing out, to examine the matter, and find out why. They just turn inside of themselves on this ground that their motive was quite pure and good. They were actuated by a right motive, and the thing that they did was not wrong; it was right. Then self-pity arises, and then this sulkiness results with a long bad time. You know what I am thinking about: David with the ark. Yes, his motive was right, his heart was right before the Lord. He had to find a place for the ark of the covenant, a place for the Lord; that was a right thing to do, and the motive was without question. But David tumbled into trouble on that, and the trouble was exceedingly serious. The whole thing was set back in a tragedy of judgment and death. No doubt David was bewildered and stunned. Yes, for the moment he felt badly towards the Lord.

But David was not of that kind who would nurse his grievance and develop this disease of self-pity. He went back to his Bible, such Bible as he had, and said, 'Now then, there must be some reason for this; I feel bad about it, the Lord does not seem to have been quite fair to me, but nevertheless the Lord is right; I am going to find out the reason for this.' That leads a long way, and when he set his heart upon getting to know the why of this, he discovered in the Word the key to the whole situation, as you know, and adjusted at once. He forsook the ground of his personal grievance. He forsook that ground where he was saying, 'But my motive was quite pure, you know, and it was not a wrong thing that I did. I meant it for the Lord, and I am quite sure that that is the thing the Lord wants.' No, he forsook that ground, came on to the ground of the Lord, and adjusted. He was alright after that. He learned a great deal for his kingship through that. It is no small thing, in the matter of wisdom, to be able to see that it is not enough to have a right and good motive, and it is not enough to do something for the Lord which you are quite sure that the Lord wants done. There is always the extra thing: that what the Lord wants done, He wants done in His own way. The Lord is not arbitrary. He is not just awkward, saying, 'No, this is the way in which I want it done.' The Lord's ways always have spiritual principles in them upon which His whole kingdom stands. The very throne of God rests upon spiritual principles, and so He has to keep to His principles. That leads us a long way. The knowledge of principles is the knowledge that is necessary for government. Well, let us leave that for a moment.

Discrimination Between Knowledge and Wisdom

There is a discrimination that has to be made, and here it is that this wisdom, this prudence in matters, has its place. This is discrimination between knowledge and wisdom. We are not just talking about a passion for knowledge. Knowledge may resolve itself into a mass of information, but wisdom is always the practical value of knowledge; how to use it, how to apply it for good. That is wisdom. It is possible for us here to have a vast amount of spiritual information, information as to what is in the Word of God, to know it all in our heads or notebooks, and yet for it to be of very little practical value in its outworking. Wisdom is a matter of how you are going to turn it to account for the glory of God, how you are going to use it.

There is all the difference between an animal and a man in this very thing - or there ought to be. Take an animal, maybe a dog, maybe a horse. It tries to do certain things or go to certain places, and with a powerful voice you shout at it, you strike home with your voice and your word. The poor creature shrinks. Perhaps you take a whip and you whip him for it. After you have done that a few times, the creature knows that he may or he may not do certain things, and he does not do them. He may just on an impulse begin to move in that direction, and then remember the whip and come back. He has learned not to do certain things or go to certain places. A lot of Christians are like that. They think they have learned something because they have suffered in certain directions for doing certain things, and they have not learned at all. What they have come to is to be afraid of doing that because of the consequences. That may be some kind of education, but it is only the education of an animal. That dog or that horse has never sat down to ask: 'Now, why may I not do that? Why may I not go there? What is it that causes my master to take that attitude? I believe he is a rational, reasonable being; I believe he knows better than I do. He must have some reason for that, he does not just thrash me for the sake of doing it. He has a reason, I must know it.' An animal never does that. He just refrains because of this external application of law. He never refrains by inward revelation of principle, of meaning. There is the difference between that kind of knowledge, which is, after all, objective, although it may have got into us through suffering in a way, and this knowing of the mind of the Lord about this. Why? What is the principle in this? What is the reason for this in God's heart?

It may be that many of you here today are smarting under the correction of the Lord. You have suffered, and you will not do it again for that reason, but I am asking you, have you wrung the meaning of this thing out? Have you got into the heart of God over this thing? Are you in possession of God's reason for His act? Do you know why that must not be? There is a difference. Wisdom is coming into possession of the Why, not just knowing the act. That is intelligence, that is discretion. Wisdom is much deeper than knowledge, and wisdom always goes for the reason, is never satisfied with just knowing that it must or must not be. It will ask, "Why? Why must it not be, why must it be? Until I know that, I have not sufficient strength to do it from the heart. I will just be doing it, or refraining from doing it, by law, because I know if I do or do not, I am breaking some law, and I shall be punished for it in the way of suffering. Oh no, this must come from the heart, and if only I can get the heart of God in this thing, then I can do it from my heart." That is wisdom. We are not to be governed by God's acts; we are to be governed by God's meanings.

Well, David learned the Why of God's ways with him. He got to the heart of God concerning the ark and the numbering of Israel. God had very severe ways, but David wrung the meaning out of them, and we are in the good of that. This coming kingdom, this coming reign to which we are called in Christ, demands men like that, who stand possessed of spiritual understanding of the ways of the Lord. We are in the school for that. Then we go on.

Constructiveness the Essence of Intelligence

The essence of true intelligence is constructiveness. Some people seem to think that criticism is superior intelligence. If they can put their finger upon the faults and talk about the flaws of others and keep all the wrong things in view, they think that they are very wise, intelligent and understanding. But notice that the whole effect of such people is destructive. If you look at the Word of God throughout, you will find that wisdom is always related to constructiveness. If Solomon is outstanding in the Old Testament, well, look at what he built, and it was for that purpose that God gave him the wisdom. If the Lord Jesus is over the whole Bible the great example of wisdom, look at what He has built. If Paul, the apostle, is a wise master-builder, see what he has built. Wisdom is always shown in its building value. Any child, even a silly child, can take things to pieces, but it requires intelligence to put them together again. Building is wisdom's outworking.

Look at Corinth. Here we have an outstanding example. The apostle opened his first letter to the Corinthians with an introduction on the matter of worldly wisdom. In effect he was saying to the Corinthians, 'You have a passion for what you call wisdom, you are just set upon wisdom. The wisdom of the whole Greek world has captivated you, and you think so highly of it; with you, wisdom is the thing.' You know how the apostle deals with that. "Christ crucified... the wisdom of God" (1 Cor. 1:23-24), a very different conception of wisdom. But then the whole letter springs out of that, and if ever there was an assembly, a company of people who were lacking in spiritual wisdom, that was the Corinthian assembly. Spiritual intelligence seemed to have little or no place there at all. The letter is one of instruction in the most elementary things, things that you would almost take for granted where Christians are concerned. You are amazed that a Christian should not know better than that. There you have the example of the lack of wisdom, discretion, good judgment, calling for instruction, as Paul puts it, as to babes. You must follow through that letter to see what wisdom really is, and over against it what folly really is.

The letter is just full of all sorts of things that Christians ought to know; they ought almost to be taken for granted. I am not going to follow through, but you see the very situation there in that assembly was a point in this matter of spiritual intelligence. A lot of people were sick. I do not know whether they had doctors in their assembly, but I think any doctors there were being kept pretty busy. Paul says, "For this cause many among you are weak and sickly" (1 Cor. 11:30). Now, of course, all people who are sick are not sick for the same reason. The fact is that inside this assembly, a lot of people were going down with illness, and there were a number of deaths, one person was dying after another. What was the attitude of the church? 'Well, these are things common to man; I suppose sickness and death are the common lot of all. Well, everybody has to die sooner or later; this is just things happening, it is a bad time we are going through perhaps, in this matter' - but that is about all there was to it. Spiritual intelligence would have said, 'What is the meaning of this? We are just not going to accept this as events; we are the Lord's people, we have the Lord, we want to know what the Lord means by this', but they did not. And the apostle had to point it out and say, "For this cause (or reason) many among you are weak and sickly, and not a few sleep." There is a cause, but there was no sufficient spiritual intelligence to get beyond the happenings to the cause, to get to the Lord for the meaning of this.

It brings us back to this point: spiritual intelligence does not just take events, happenings, but goes to the Lord, and says, 'Now then Lord, what do You mean by this? We must know what You have in mind in this; is this thing for Your glory, Lord? If not, then we stand against it; if You are going to get glory out of this, alright, we will stand with You, but we are not just accepting these incidents, we want to know what You mean by them.'

And how many other things like that there were at Corinth. The whole letter is just full of instruction on what spiritual intelligence means, what spiritual discrimination means, and Paul is here operating as the wise master-builder. It is to these people that he speaks of himself as such, a wise master-builder (1 Cor. 3:10). A feature of building, spiritual building, the building of the church, the building of an assembly, is this faculty of discrimination. Look at all the things to be discriminated in that letter to the Corinthians. They were not discriminating between spiritual gifts and spiritual graces, and Paul sought to make it very clear that grace is much more than gifts. 'You are glorying in and gloating over your gifts, but there is something very much more important than that; it is grace.' Wisdom can discriminate between such things. "The things that differ" was the phrase Paul used to the Philippians (1:10). The question is always arising. What does all this amount to? What does it all lead to? There may be the gift of tongues, but where is it leading, what is it resulting in, what is the upshot of it all? Why confusion here, disorder here, anything but the glory of God? And wisdom judges everything from the standpoint of God's glory. Remember that.

In a word, wisdom's great value is found in defeating the enemy. The book of Judges is constructed upon that. The Lord raised up judges, and they are supposed to be the people with discretion, discrimination, good judgment, counsel for the Lord's people and their business. Therefore their wisdom and spiritual intelligence was to defeat the enemy. That is an abiding principle. Wisdom finds its inclusive value in defeating the enemy. And what is the enemy's object through anything at Corinth, whether it be the disgraceful behaviour at the Lord's Table, or the women coming into the assembly of the Lord's people where the Lord was, just as they would anywhere else without a sign of subjection (a head-covering), or any of the many other objections? It is the devil taking glory from God, it is the devil seeking to act against that ultimate thing, "Unto Him be the glory in the church by Christ Jesus" - to take that glory out of the church. And wisdom operates to defeat the devil in his ultimate object of taking the glory from God. So that wisdom, let me repeat, is always actuated by this question: How does this minister to the glory of God? And nothing else matters.

May the Lord take His word, instruct us by it, and bring us under His hand to be men and women prudent in matters.

Chapter 10 - The Presence of the Lord

"Then answered one of the young men, and said, Behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, that is skilful in playing, and a mighty man of valour, and a man of war, and prudent in speech, and a comely person; and the Lord is with him" (1 Sam. 16:18).

These are, as we have seen, keys to the whole life of David, and now we come to the last: "and the Lord is with him". We have been seeing how each of these things, mentioned for the first time, developed in the life of David to fulness, and found their ultimate realisation in his son Solomon, and in the House of the Lord, pointing on to another: the greater Son of David, the Lord Jesus, of whom each of these things could be said in a so much fuller way, and who Himself, the greater than Solomon, hands them all on to the House of God, "whose house are we" (Heb. 3:6). So that the House, through fully developed sonship, becomes the vessel and embodiment of all these things in fulness, and that becomes particularly clear and true when we arrive at this inclusive final feature: "and the Lord is with him".

You observe what has just taken place. It says a little before: "and the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward" (1 Sam. 16:13). "Now the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul" (verse 14). "Then answered one of the young men, and said, Behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, that is skilful in playing, and a mighty man of valour, and a man of war, and prudent in speech, and a comely person; and the Lord is with him."

The Lord's Presence the Crowning Feature

I would like to say first of all, in a very simple way, that that is the test, after all; that is the crowning feature. So far we have not much history of David, and what we have is quite secret and is what has taken place out of public view, out of the way of any conspicuous position, and yet in the hour of emergency, or the hour of trouble, there was a young man who has taken note of this other young man, and who says, "I have seen a son of Jesse... and the Lord is with him." It was not because David had a public position and was in a conspicuous place and there were great manifestations of this fact that the Lord was with him so that all could see. And it was not because David was in a place of popularity. In fact, David was anything but in such a place. He was despised by his own brothers and his own father had not thought it worthwhile bringing him to Samuel at the feast in Bethlehem (and remember the feast that Samuel called for was in Bethlehem, and David was right on hand) but he was left out, not considered of sufficient importance to be brought into the family gathering, just left outside. It was for none of these reasons of position, respect, popularity and recognition that the young man came to this conclusion. What I mean is this: it was not because there were all the evidences in his life that the Lord was with him, that therefore he was a popular man, he was respected, he was brought to the fore, he was taken account of by everybody, and highly thought of. Rather it was true that he was having a difficult time and he was in a difficult position.

The point is this, that so often we think that if the Lord is with us, the evidence will be surely that people will be friendly, people will take note of us, we will be given some position and recognition, or that things will generally go well. Put that round the other way. If things are not going well, if we are not being taken account of, and we do not have any place given to us, and things really are difficult, if we are having a lonely and trying time, that surely must mean the Lord is not with us. It means nothing of the kind. It was not for any of those reasons that the young man came to this conclusion. It must be on some other ground altogether. He had observed David, he had come into touch with David - David in the shadows, in difficulty, in adversity, in loneliness, and yet his touch with David brought this to him, 'The Lord is with that fellow, he is not having an easy time in his home, in his family or anywhere else, but you have to say, the Lord is with him, and that is all there is to it.' And that is, after all, the thing that matters.

I want to say to you at the outset, before I open this up more fully, that the thing that matters where we are concerned, is not what we are among men, even among the people of God officially, not that things are going prosperously with us, but that when people know us and touch us, they say, 'When I meet that man or that woman I meet the Lord.' That is the thing that matters, and I would ask you to lay that to heart. You may be hungering after something else, a place, position, recognition, work, and so on, in the Lord and for the Lord. But the thing that matters more than all that, whether you have that or whether you do not have that, is that when people touch you, they touch the Lord, when they meet you, they meet the Lord, that there is someone who, observing, is able to pass this verdict: 'The Lord is with him, the Lord is with her' - not because of anything that can be seen, but you just meet the Lord. That is very simple, but it goes to the heart and root of everything. Do you not covet that more than anything else? Surely you do. Well, that is possible for the least, the most despised among men, the most ostracised among Christians. It is just beautifully possible that people have to say, 'Well, whatever you say about them, whatever the attitude of other people towards them is, you meet the Lord.'

And that can be not only true of individuals, but also of companies. They may be ostracised, they may be criticised, there may be any amount of prejudice and despising and evil-speaking, but after all, the verdict comes back to this - do you meet the Lord? And if you meet the Lord, that is all that matters, the rest can go.

The Anointing of the Holy Spirit

Well now, we have to look at this more closely for a little while, and see why it was and how it was that the Lord was with David. Of course, inclusively it is gathered into that: "and the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward" (verse 13). That is the inheritance of every one of us. The Holy Spirit was never the sole possession or privilege of David or of any one man. The Holy Spirit is as much our birthright as He was David's. If David was anointed, the sure, clear declaration of the New Testament is that we are anointed in Christ, and what more do you want than that? And that makes the same thing possible.

The Presence of the Lord a Primary Matter

But then there are other things to be said about it, of course. Let us take the whole, full range in which it is set. The presencing of the Lord is a primary matter in the whole Bible from beginning to end. You find that it was an original thought of the Lord to presence Himself with man, and so in the garden when the Lord has finished His creation and is able to say, "It is very good", in other words, 'This satisfies My heart, this is what I have been desiring, what I have been wanting, what I have been after.' When the Lord can pronounce the verdict of good pleasure upon His work, He walks in it and presences Himself there. He comes into the garden, takes His delight. It is His place, He is at rest there, He has His pleasure there. He says, "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased", and in principle it is not so far a cry from the garden of Eden to the Lord Jesus.

Although the Lord had to withdraw, the Lord lost that which satisfied His heart, He comes back again through the Old Testament in the great types, in the tabernacle, and the temple, showing that He has not abandoned His thought and desire and intention; not given it up. He is still clinging to it, He is holding on. When all things were made according to the pattern, satisfying the heavenly thought, the Lord filled the tabernacle and the Lord filled the temple. The presencing of Himself is still the deepest desire in His heart. The Old Testament closes, and it does not close with that presence of the Lord in fulness. It is only realised in a little company - "Then they that feared the Lord spake one with another; and the Lord hearkened, and heard, and a book of remembrance was written before Him, for them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon His name. And they shall be Mine, saith the Lords of hosts, even Mine own possession, in the day that I make ('in that day when I make up My special treasure' A.V.)" (Mal. 3:6-17). Why His special, peculiar treasure? Simply because they answered in some measure to that first thought, providing Him with a place where He could come for enjoyment and rest.

The New Testament opens, the Lord Jesus is here, Emmanuel, God with us. "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matt. 3:17). And the verdict later upon His whole life here was: "for God was with Him" (Acts 10:38). God has found His place of presencing in His Son.

But that is not the end. The Son brings in the sons, constitutes His house, and on the day of Pentecost the Lord fills it, presences Himself in His church, and finds a great deal of pleasure there. We leave that for the present.

Then the Word begins to open up a new vista. When all that which has been pointing to the ultimate comes to its ultimate fulfilment, in the end when it is possible for an apostle in vision, in revelation, to cry, "The tabernacle of God is with men, and He shall dwell with them, and they shall be His peoples, and God Himself shall be with them, and be their God" (Rev. 21:3). The great heavenly tabernacle, the church, is now filled with glory, the Lord's presence. That is the setting of this.

A Consuming Passion

Why was the Lord with David? Because David's whole life was captivated by this thought, this one purpose - the presence of God. There was one thing that gathered up all that David was and had - that was the house of God. You read again Psalm 132, "I will not give sleep to mine eyes, or slumber to mine eyelids; until I find out a place for the Lord" (Ps. 132:4,5). Here is a man who is consumed with this single idea - a place for the preserving of the Lord, or, if you like, the presencing of the Lord, that the Lord should be present, that the Lord should have His place, that the Lord should find that in which He can have His pleasure and His rest. "Arise, O Lord", cries David, "into Thy resting-place" (Ps. 132:8). And that is why the Lord was with David, because David was a man of one idea.

He had many things in his life, but everything in David's life had to bend to this thing, that the Lord should be known as present. That is the major factor, and it comes that way. It does not just come automatically. It is a matter of the consuming passion of our life, that over all the other affairs, has one interest and makes all the other things as far as possible bend to that interest. You have got your business, your profession, your home, many things, but your heart is set upon this matter of the Lord's place, that as soon as you can get away from business, if you can get to the place where the Lord is, you make for it as quickly as you can. You swallow your cup of tea, or go without it, to be there. You are making your business, your profession, your home, bend towards this presencing of the Lord. That is your passion, and if it is, the Lord will be with you. And you get a company of people in any place like that, and you will meet the Lord. That is something more than a congregation going to 'divine service'. It is a company bound together with one idea, one passion, one master-conception - the Lord, and the Lord here.

That turned out to be the glorious issue of David's life because it was like that all the way through, there came in Solomon and the temple, the glorious house of God. David said, "The house... must be exceeding magnificent" (1 Chron. 22:5), 'for it is for the Lord', and it was so, as things go temporally, but only a shadow, a foreshadowing, of what will be - transcendent glory at last. Do you think it is just going to come about? No, it is going to come through the heart-devotion of men and women to this thing now.

Look again at David, how his heart for the Lord provided the Lord with a ground for His House. That passion, that devotion, that concern involved David in the cost of everything. David was no time-server or man-pleaser. David had no secondary considerations of: How do I stand to gain or lose by the course I am taking, by this step to which I am committing myself? How is it going to affect me, and my interests, and my future? David was never affected at all by public opinion, popular opinion, nor religious opinion. David had no concern for the accepted, established, recognised order of things. If that likes to contribute to this end, well and good, but position, opportunity for self-realisation, never came into his mind. He could have had a great deal if he had set his heart upon it and was prepared to compromise. If only he would have compromised with Saul, with Saul's kingdom, he could have obtained a good deal. But there was something in him that would not allow him to do that, and so all these things were just brushed aside.

If you or I should at any time have a secondary consideration, that is, that we shall lose prestige, position, opportunity, that we shall spoil our future, well, anything like that at all, if that is going to affect or influence us, take it that the verdict will never be "and the Lord was with him". The Lord was with David because at all costs - though it cost him his home, though it cost him his place in the kingdom, though it cost him comforts and everything else, at all costs he is going on with the Lord; he is after what the Lord is after. That was the man, there is no doubt about it.

The Proving of the Heart

David did not have the revelation and pattern of the house of God at the beginning; that came to him much later. It is not that David was behaving, acting, deciding and choosing in full view of the great revelation of the house of God. That had not come to him, the pattern was not shown until afterwards. But David's heart was set upon the Lord and what the Lord wanted was the first thing, and then a period of proving that that was true, and it was a long and terrible period of proving that that after all was true.

It is not enough for us to be after what the Lord wants. It is essential that, when everything of that seems to have been rendered impossible and all that our heart has been set upon seems to have been entirely put away, and everything now seems to argue against it, the time is a time of intense trial and difficulty, and it goes on and on. The trial is not made milder, it is through that that we are tried and proved as to whether the Lord can lead us right into the realisation of His purpose.

You will have plenty of opportunity to abandon what you have started out for, and if you argue naturally, you will have plenty of reason for abandoning it. Everything will say, "Well, you have made a mistake, you have started towards something impossible". It is all a beautiful idea, but you see it was an illusion, it is impossible of realisation, it is not practical, and all sorts of things like that. Today when you talk about the heavenly church, the church as revealed through Paul, especially in the Ephesian letter, you bring that into view, what is the reaction? 'Oh yes, it is a beautiful ideal, but it is not possible of realisation. You are going to spend your strength and time and life for nought if you think that anything like that, with Christianity as it is now, can be realised in a world like this.' Everything on the outside argues (and very often there is a lot on the inside that seems to confirm the argument) to say you are a fool, you are on a fool's errand, you are in a false paradise. David went through that sort of thing, and was proved as to his heart, and when that heart of his for the Lord was proved by deep testings of many kinds, then the Lord gave him the vision, the revelation, and showed him the pattern. The great, open heaven came to him after a time of deep trying and testing. Then it came. But it does not come in any other way. It does not come until our hearts have been proved as to whether we really do mean business with God at any cost, and the cost is sometimes very great. Read again the life of this man and what his devotion to the Lord cost him, and think yourself into the story; use your imagination a bit. You will find that for many years David had a most terrible time of testing his heart. The Lord answered back.

What are you after, dear friends? That is the point. Are you after position, place, reputation, prosperity, success, recognition, popularity, an easy life, or anything like that? Very well, the end will not be this, that whoever touches you will say, 'I meet the Lord in him, in her.' That is the thing that is in the balances. The point is, are we willing to lose everything for the Lord that is here in this life?

David's Preparation for the House

Well, when David did get the pattern, when it was shown to him by the open heaven, he drew everything towards its realisation. It is a wonderful account in 1 Chronicles 28 and 29 of David's preparation for the house, all the things that he says, 'I have prepared, I have prepared, I have prepared' - gold for the things of gold, silver for the things of silver, brass for the things of brass, iron for the things of iron. It is a long catalogue of his gathering and preparing for the realisation of this Divinely given vision. He is out in all directions to find that which can answer to God's heart, which can fulfil this thing. He is on full stretch in every direction to collect for the house of God. Interpret that spiritually, bring it together.

The Giving of One's Own Treasure

Yes, but that is not all. We can do a great deal by getting things together and getting work done, but the heart of this comes out in that portion that I have just mentioned. When David has done all that, "I have a treasure of mine of gold and silver, I give it unto the house of my God." That is subjective; it is not objective, it is inward. David had stored up for himself his nest egg, something precious to himself. 'I give it - a treasure of my own.' Oh, that might mean many things in the case of many people, but whatever it might mean regarding your personal treasure, something you have treasured for yourself, some hope you have treasured, some prospect you have treasured, to let it go in the interests of the Lord's House. The point is that it is something that costs us inwardly for the Lord. "Seeing that I have a treasure of mine own". This man stopped at nothing. He let his last possession go in order that the Lord should have His place.

I need say no more. You have the answer as to why the Lord was with David. In looking back upon his whole life now, with all its dark pages, with all that which we are sorry for, looking over his whole life we have to say, God was with that man. He was not perfect, he was not sinless or faultless; he made mistakes, he slipped up, he grievously defaulted, but you cannot get away from it, in the sum total of that man's life you have to say, God was with that man. We are not faultless, we are not perfect, we are very weak, and we make many mistakes, but there is something over all that. If we have a heart for God like this, proved to be a heart for God through testings, discouragement, frustration, persecution, sorrow and suffering, if it is proved that we have nothing too precious to hold back from the Lord, although we may be weak and faulty and all the rest of it, the verdict will be: God is with that man, that woman, God is with them, you meet the Lord in them. The Lord give us grace to be like that.

Chapter 11 - The Crowning of the King

"Then all Israel gathered themselves to David unto Hebron, saying, Behold, we are thy bone and thy flesh. In times past, even when Saul was king, it was thou that leddest out and broughtest in Israel: and the Lord thy God said unto thee, Thou shalt be shepherd of My people Israel, and thou shalt be prince over My people Israel. So all the elders of Israel came to the king to Hebron; and David made a covenant with them in Hebron before the Lord; and they anointed David king over Israel, according to the word of the Lord by Samuel" (1 Chron. 11:1-3).

"All these, being men of war, that could order the battle array, came with a perfect heart to Hebron, to make David king over all Israel: and all the rest also of Israel were of one heart to make David king. And they were there with David three days, eating and drinking; for their brethren had made preparation for them. Moreover they that were nigh unto them, even as far as Issachar and Zebulon and Naphtali, brought bread on asses, and on camels, and on mules, and on oxen, victuals of meal, cakes of figs, and clusters of raisins, and wine, and oil, and oxen, and sheep in abundance: for there was joy in Israel" (1 Chron. 12:38-40).

That is a foreshadowing. There are two counterparts of that. The first was that which took place on the day of Pentecost, and followed on for some weeks or months afterwards. It is not at all difficult to see the spiritual counterpart at that time. It was when the Lord Jesus came into His own, when it was fulfilled that God highly exalted Him, and gave Him the Name which is above every Name, set Him at His own right hand, far above all (Phil. 2:9). It was then that the echo of that was found among the believers on earth, and it was a great time, this day of Pentecost, as they gathered together. The account is one which, in spirit at least, very truly corresponds to what we have here in the crowning of David. But that looks on to another time, the great day when the cry, the proclamation, shall be heard: "The marriage of the Lamb is come." We have that wonderful picture in Revelation 19, a great crowd, great joy, the Lord has at last, not only personally and in heaven, but with all His own, come into His own. There is great rejoicing. "Let us rejoice and be exceeding glad... for the marriage of the Lamb is come" (verse 7).

You will have no difficulty in seeing in these Bible passages which we have read, the carrying into fulness of all those six things which have occupied us throughout concerning David and his life of music and praise and worship. Here it breaks out in the people of God, a great rejoicing. As a man of valour, a man of war, as a man of character and personal presence, as a man of prudence in affairs, as a man with whom the Lord was, this is the day when it all comes out in wonderful fulness, the day of his vindication. Yes, that is all true. Our hearts are stirred and moved when we read the story. "There was joy in Israel."

But what is the point for this moment? Well, first of all, is this not what the Lord would have now, in between then and that final great celebration? Is it not possible to have some little taste of that now? Are we to wait for it all until then? Is it a beautiful story in the Old Testament? Is there to be nothing like it until we are all in glory? I do not believe that. The Lord would have something like that now. It can be. He would have it. He would have His people, though it may not be where they are all concerned, He would have them in companies in the good of this, enjoying Him, and there being great joy in Israel. And it need not be only at conference times, Easter, Whitsun and August, for example. Should it not be like this whenever the Lord's people are together? It surely should and can be.

The End of a Period of Disappointment

There are some very beautiful, precious features of this whole thing, and I just want to touch upon them as briefly and quickly as I can. This marked the end of a time which had been full of disappointment: Saul's reign. Saul was man's idea of things. Saul was man's choice, and Saul's kingship and kingdom was after man's mind and after man's will, not according to the Lord's mind. But man had chosen and insisted and persisted and determined, and would take no other, so the Lord allowed it. It is always like that. Make up your mind strongly enough, and the Lord will let you have it. So they did, and the Lord let them have it. But it was a terrible disappointment. Israel was no fundamental unity during all the days of Saul. It was an artificial unity. It was like tying a lot of things together and holding them together. There was no inward basic oneness, and after the first excitement and glamour had passed, it soon began to be manifest that the thing was rotten at the root and core, and it began to fall apart, to disintegrate.

Steadily the whole thing began to split up and divide. In that kingdom division after division became the order of the day. There was no oneness, no real cohesion. It was something that had to be held together, propped up, kept going, a great make-believe of a kingdom, and the people of God were in a state of terrible disillusionment. They had their visions and their hopes, their expectations, but they were steadily being disappointed. The people were becoming disillusioned about this whole thing. Dissatisfaction, growing dissatisfaction: 'This is not it, this is not really what we meant, what we feel should be.' And increasing difficulties and complications came to the nation; debts, because this whole thing was too expensive to keep going, this regime was a very expensive thing, and was undermining all resources. It had to be kept going, and it was getting a bit too much, and so they were getting into debt by the very system that they had set up; they could not pay their way. These were features of it, and at last the whole thing collapsed, and a disillusioned people were left thinking.

But thank God, there was something positive to think about, and it was such a people that came from one direction and another, from the wilderness, from Ziklag and elsewhere, to Hebron. They had remembered, they had known in their hearts that, while this other thing of their choice was not it, they also knew in their heart that there was something that was it, that it was not just a vacuum, a nothing, an emptiness. They knew that it was what they needed. Well, that is really the spiritual background. And so they came.

I think that you are interpreting as I go along because the people who are going to come into this joy of real satisfaction, contentment and appreciation, who are able to say, 'This is it!' have got to have a history by which they come to know that the thing that is not it, is not it. God is very practical. He could have prevented the tragedy of all those years taken out of their lives, while Saul was king officially. But He did not do it, and God does not do that sort of thing. God works to the positive by perhaps allowing years of our lives to be occupied with the negative so that we may more and more become aware of how negative it is, how empty it is. When we do come into the real thing, we know it by contrast, and no one ever does appreciate the positive who has not bitterly tasted of the negative. In the sovereignty and providence of God, that is the way in which He gets a people who are full of gratitude, praise and appreciation, a people who know, because they know the difference. That is basic to a scene like this. They are disillusioned people, they are people who know the emptiness and the hollowness, not only of the world, but of a religious system which does not answer to spiritual need, but is simply an official thing holding the ground, like the kingdom of Saul.

Well, they were a divided people, all over the place, in sections; divisions arose in that realm, and division followed division. As we have said, there was no fundamental oneness. It was a state of want. There was shortage, limitation, straightness, not enough to keep body and soul together. It was hard work to find enough to live on. Interpret that spiritually. It was a way and a time when all their efforts and endeavours and all their labour and their hard work led to nothing. Saul made them work right enough. Samuel had told them what he would make them do, and they worked, and all their labour was ineffective and unprofitable. It brought nothing back to them, and it was anything but a life of glory. There was no glory in Israel in those days.

The Way of Spiritual Fulness

What is the cure for such a situation, the cure for divisions, the cure for spiritual lack and poverty? What is the way of spiritual fulness? What is the way of effectiveness in life, service and ministry? What is the way of the glory? The answer is quite simple - make Jesus King, bring God's anointed into His place fully, recognise the place that God has given to the Lord Jesus, recognise that until He has His place, all these conditions will obtain, but when He has His place, that is the way out, the way over. All Israel came with a perfect, complete, undivided and unreserved heart to make David king. That is the answer to everything.

It is the answer to our own individual lives if they are disintegrated, broken up, divided. If they are disappointed, hungry, lacking and knowing no spiritual fulness, if their labour attains no proportionate result for eternity, if they lack the glory, well, the answer for us individually is just the Lord having His place in fulness and without any reserve on our part.

That extends to companies of the Lord's people, for you can have a local company that is knowing very little about oneness and spiritual fulness, spiritual effectiveness, and glory. What is the cure? That every individual heart in that company has but one thought: the glory and honour and praise of the Lord Jesus. It is the cure.

And what is true for the individual and for the local company is true for conferences and is true for the universal representation. It is just marvellous how, coming from all over the world, various nations and different languages, complexions, outlooks and constitutions, may come and the Lord Jesus is the only object of your coming, and in view. Why, there is a wonderful unity. All nationalities and everything else that is divisive on this earth simply disappears; it is no longer there. All those things go, and there is wonderful spiritual fulness and great joy. It is true. It is all a matter of the Lord coming into His place wholly.

Well, that sounds a simple statement, but it may mean a good deal more than we realise. These people who came had been a part of that other thing. They had been in that choosing and appointing of Saul. They had been alongside of Saul, they had moved out and in with Saul. But here they are confessing that they had been wrong, that even while Saul was king, he really was not; they were wrong. They were to confess and put right what they had done wrong. It is not always easy.

The joy, the glory, the blessed feasting upon the Lord's fulness may all be held up for want of some definite admission and confession of wrong. It becomes very practical. A life may be held up as to the glory of the Lord in it, the song of the Lord in it, because it will not let go and say, 'I have been wrong in this and that.' We may know quite well that things are not right, and yet not be prepared to get right down, in a humble way, and say, 'Look here, I have been holding on to this position all this time, tenaciously refusing to give it up, but now I acknowledge that I have been wrong.' The glory may wait for that.

It is just probable that many of these people had been very suspicious and critical of David, had taken Saul's part against him, and perhaps been in the train of Saul in hunting him, and now they are saying, 'We have all been wrong.' It involves us in very practical things. I am not going to pursue that any further, but it is one thing to just say, 'Yes, make Jesus king.' Sometimes that does require the going back upon a whole course, the letting go of a whole position which we have not been prepared to let go, the standing strongly for something which really has not proved to be of God, which has not had the seal of God upon it. We believed it was of God, and we have held to that position, but it has not had the seal of God on it, and all the marks of that withheld seal have been there: dissatisfaction, spiritual limitation, a disintegration of life, no fruitful service. Yes, the Lord's seal is thus seen to be withheld, and yet we may cling to our position. But they came and made this confession, went right back on the whole thing. 'Even when Saul was king, you were the right one, you were the one that the Lord had chosen and anointed.' He might well have said then, 'If you have known that all along, if that is your position, why have you held to that position all this time until Saul is dead and out of the way, and you have no one to take his place?' But no, it is an honest admission. It is not just because they are forced to it. They know in their hearts what God would have.

It is just the gathering up of this whole series into this, that the way of the glory - that is what we have been occupied with - the way of the fulness, is the way in which the Lord has His place, not only as over against the world in our hearts, but over against much that claims to be of the Lord that really is not of the Lord.

This whole system of Saul's kingdom is a great type of what we have, even in Christendom today, something in which people are spiritually starved, something that holds the ground officially, something that does not help people to pay their way spiritually. It is something that is resolving into division after division, sect after sect, and section after section. That is not the mark of the Lord's lordship at all. No, I do believe that the Lord would have it in as great a representation as possible, but if He cannot have it in a general way, He would have it in small ways, an expression of this very thing, a people together, eating and drinking, feasting and rejoicing, and it can be and will be if the Lord really has His place.

Oh, I know that you are all ready to say that you make Jesus Lord. You use all the language that is available about crowning Him Lord of all but, you know, in our lives it is tremendously pointed and practical. We are constantly coming up against something which brings us into collision with the Lord, something we want which our hearts are set upon, something that we like, something that is personal, something that we do not want the Lord to have or to do. That is the issue. No less an issue than the very throne of God, of our Lord Jesus, is involved in things like that. It may be a prejudice. No doubt many of these people were prejudiced against David. It may be a prejudice we have to get out of the way for the Lord's sake.

It may be one or more of any number of things, but the point is that the Lord has got to sweep this whole ground with His Lordship, and there has to be a perfect heart to make Jesus King. The Lord help us to do that, and all that this series has been about will become very real and very true, and, not least of all, the music will go on.