AUSTRALIAN BIBLE CHURCH

October 14, 2007

A CONTINUATION OF THE THRUST AND BASE OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
OF AUSTRALIA ON BIBLICAL LINES …

WHO INCREASES JOY IN THE LORD ? THE MEEK!

  PART I

Isaiah 29:15-21: Meekness before His Mastery, Joy in His Company, Peace as a Friend and Equity for Equanimity, with Mark 10:41-45 (following for Part II):

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"Woe to those who seek deep to hide their counsel from the LORD,
and their works are in the dark, and they say,
Who sees us? and who knows us?

"Surely your turning of things upside down will be esteemed as the potter’s clay:
for shall the work say of him who made it, He did not make me ?
or shall the thing framed say of him who framed it, He had no understanding?

"Is it not yet a very little while, and Lebanon shall be turned into a fruitful field,
and the fruitful field shall be esteemed as a forest?

"And in that day shall the deaf hear the words of the book,
and the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity, and out of darkness.
The meek also shall increase their joy in the LORD,
and the poor among men shall rejoice in the Holy One of Israel.  

"For the terrible one is brought to nought, and the scorner is consumed,
and all that watch for iniquity are cut off:
That make a man an offender for a word,
and lay a snare for him who reproves in the gate,
and turn aside the just for a thing of nought" - from Isaiah 29. 

 

You know that those who are considered rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. Yet it shall not be so among you; but whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant, and whoever of you desires to be first shall be servant of all, for even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many" - from Mark 10.

I   Ways of Unwisdom

The hiding from the Lord, Topsy-Turvy for Truth, Mutiny against the Master

Clever in their own eyes are those who, hiding from the Lord, expose their thoughts to history as a new-born calf to the winds. Understanding is theirs, wisdom waits on them, they distil truth, forgetting equity and justice, kindness and mercy and living a blind dream.

This is CLAY speaking to the POTTER, the made masquerading before the Maker, with all the wisdom of a fretful bull! Will their marvellous resources of understanding be attributed to its absence ? and if so, is not their complacency the result of fiasco!  Is folly their father and the death the author of their lives ? He did not make me! they bellow, and vacant is the divine mind! If vacuity were their father nought would be their offspring. What then but rampant ruin for such a fiasco would you expect from the One who DID the works and CONTRIVED their creation! But God is not pushed; His plans mature copiously. With what then do they deal ?

This is merely mutiny, the excellence of the gifts becoming the axe for the audacity which over-reaches itself, as if to make its Maker subordinate to its own meaningless thoughts, in their model, born from mindless nothings. As the cause, so the result! If nothing they are, nothing's spawn, then to nothing let them come, proud dabblers in illusion, and unseemly graspers to take over man! Such is the thrust here in Isaiah 29. 

 

II   Ways of Divine Response

Inverting of ease, and restoration of barrenness, Messiah's Lesson on Power

First God will turn what was abundant and a place for revolt to be starved into a blatant sacrifice of pride to poverty. Then He will make what had suffered to excel bringing power to the weak, that those who are fast will be slow, while the simple gain fruitage. How often this has been done to imperial powers such as Assyria (Nineveh, the vast capital, even lost for centuries ... imagine losing London), Babylon (a desert residue with no glory), Tyre (its site abundant in water, but not repopulated); and Jerusalem.

As to that,  how often has it been destroyed, corrupted by reason of its brightness (cf. Ezekiel 29), a centre of judgment given mercy in the end as part of the plan so long announced, now unfolding before our 20th-21st century eyes! Indeed, how grandly the city has been restored to life and to its people, a prediction already fulfilled (Luke 21:24). It had a time for the restoration, and it is now.

This site was to be restored, and it IS restored after the most prodigious destructions, even of passion by Rome! as Daniel foretold it would be (Daniel 9). It was threatened in 1948 as even impossible to be gained by Israel, but they gained half of it; while in 1967, after maritime blockade against Israel as a whole, they gained all of it. Later, despite rocket attacks in 1991, courtesy of Iraq, they endured while the rulers of that land were dismantled (as in Micah 5:5-6,13, an end-time prediction as show in Micah 5:-3 with 5:13-15).

Past all the newspaper hype, look for the type, the actual result in black and white. It is here. It is Israel's.

Now they plan to make it for Arab and Jew alike, the capital; and here will come one more of those set-backs to 'world-peace' which merely means compromise by bringing comfort to major powers, in efforts without any understanding of the word or the wisdom of God, to 'solve' what God has done. He took Israel out for sin and He brought them back for faithfulness to His promise to Abraham, and they are back (cf. Micah 7:14--20, Ezekiel 39:28-30, Romans 11). Now the Madrid Quartet, UN, USA, UK and Russia, want to meddle. The conflicts that terminate the Age are now well in train, Iran already belching verbal fire! Its President Ahmadinejad has become an explicit mouth for the fire...

Titanic forces are to be unleashed (Ezekiel 38ff.), for what would you expect when man seeks to undo God's word and make his own to stick. This is not the first time. Indeed, for some 6000 years at least, man has done this by one method or another, and God has undone what man so rabidly does. Israel has had adequate correction alas, but now are the Gentiles willingly to put their heads into the same noose, and seek to make the Almighty scramble, as they scrap about the site of Christ's crucifixion, and try to remove from Israel more and more of what God gave, even dividing Jerusalem the capital, to exclude again what their sin took from them, even when God in mercy has brought them back! Yes they will.

Does a mouse take on a lynx ? or a mite a bob-cat! Are they losing their wits that they toy
with truth and assault actuality ? Is God to be deemed witless with the wits they took from His hand ? Will they outwit the Almighty who made them to exist! So does man's turning of things upside down, find the revulsion and horror which revolt from the Almighty seeks, and finds, as when one looks for gold and finds only gore, outside the veins.

 

 III   The Crux that Comes, the Christ who Acts
The Weak finding their Health,  The Meek increasing their Joy

Thus was Israel in general, and Judah in particular with its Jerusalem capital, to suffer, but to be restored first  in the days of Ezra, then in those of the Maccabees, who actually built a Jewish Empire, before Rome took it and till Christ came, as forecast in Isaiah 29:18-19, this the ultimate remedy (cf. 28:16, 40, 49-55, 61). Now it is back with them, God awaiting their return in heart.

But the centerpiece has come. Christ came! Deity arrived with the face of His grace (cf. John 1:1,14-18. 8:58, Exodus 3:14). Then were those predicted acts of omnipotence when Christ, the Son of God,  seeing many with incurable sicknesses and salient diseases, would cure them ALL (Matthew 4:24, 12:15, Luke 6:19). It was no small affair. It was one that made Him inscrutable to flesh, beautiful to the meek and desired by nearly all. In Matthew 4, we read that His fame went out into all of Syria and a vast variety of those sick with dangerous diseases were brought and healed, many coming from Jerusalem and Galilee also (a site focussed for His light in the prediction of Isaiah 8-9). Christ added His WORDS to His WORKS, and thus there came the Sermon on the Mount, so appealing to many, so often desired, so seldom obeyed by comparison.

Thus the world lapses.

Yet then indeed in His day on this earth, were the eyes of the blind opened, both physically, and in many cases spiritually as well, as they saw mere time-serving religion exposed as they returned  to the very lap of the Almighty. It was not by vagueness, but by precision, as in aircraft engineering, when God became man in the Incarnation of Jesus the Christ. Vast were the multitudes healed of the medically incurable and demonic, but even in one such physical healing, billions of cells (each complex like New York city, says micro-biologist Dr Michael Denton) may need to be revived, replaced or re-organised. The power of creation in information is then made to appear, even thousands of years after it came! There was the climax of Christ at one with His Father, the Creator of the universe, nothing too tiny, too complex, too involved, all obeying as in the initial creation, the word of command (cf. Genesis 1).

Jesus made the point that healing the afflicted, if not planned but merely coming to Him, was a mercy and God is merciful: hence it could occur even on the day of rest, the Sabbath. Hated for this daring, by crude formalists (Would you not take your cow out of the pit, if it fell there on a Sabbath ? He asked pointedly), busy with their murderous plotting (Matthew 12:14), He withdrew, only to be followed by "great multitudes" (wouldn't you follow, if dangerously ill!). Yet while seeking low publicity (cf. Mark 1:27-28, John 6:26, Mark 7:36) to avoid mere clutter and hostile breaches, as to the sick, "He healed all of them." He did not dabble. When God is there, circumstances are mere means, and cannot stop Him.

Again, having chosen in a night of prayer, the apostles (to be - Luke 6:12-17), He came down from the mountain of prayer and at a level place, faced "a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem, and from the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon". They had two stated motives: to HEAR Him and to be healed of their diseases. They sought to touch Him, like so many untouchables suddenly permitted to stretch forth the hand ... and what do we read in the record of those who found in Him truth and power and wisdom and peace ?

It is this: "they were healed." This included those spiritually demented, possessed in a way many missionaries have found to be all too true, and which may begin to afflict this increasingly godless nation of Australia. Result in all this, response to what was wonderful ? RELIGIOUS plans to murder Him (Matthew 12:14-17), this the more after the later miracle of Lazarus, so stark, complete and utterly human in love, yet divine in power (John 11, incl. 49-53).  This world seeks still to kill divine wonder in schools and universities, mass media and propagandas of violence.

In His words at this sort of setting, He said this (Luke 6:22-23):

"Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you,
And revile you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of Man's sake.
Rejoice in that day and leap for joy!
For indeed your reward is great in heaven,
For in a similar manner their fathers acted toward the prophets."

There it is, that meekness which receives  God's goodness, on the one side, contrasted on the other, with the carnal, the fleshly, the autonomous lust to control the world, to use the world or abuse it, to make use of one's fellows for one's pride or power or place (cf. John 11:50). It is not degrees of morality which we find, but action against the starkly revealed God. It was against Jesus; it is against His Church (John 16:2 attesting what history has simply shown in due time); and it is against God's special display nation - Israel (Isaiah 43:21).

As to them,  Israel provided the scriptures as directed (Romans 9), before killing Him who inspired them, as predicted (Isaiah 49-54).

Gentile nations, enthused for a time, then followed suit and now appear intent on killing His name by propaganda. This is unceasingly increasing as are the wares and grievances, the cruelties and hostility, the inane ambitions and insane spiritual substitutes (Hosea 9:7), slithering, serpentine and satanic, for the simple and direct companionship of God. It is these and not Himself  which men increasingly seek in revolt, and desire in rebellion.

But what of this meekness ? We read this: The meek shall increase their joy in the Lord.

Peace flows like blood through the arteries, happiness is inherited like a mansion on a farmland, contentment becomes like the mooing of cows on the gentle pastures, though many a storm may afflict you from time to time (cf. I Peter 4:12-17, and remember Job! with I Peter 1:6). Peter speaks of your faith being tried for a time IF NEED BE! That IF NEED BE speaks... You may need some storms to reshape the bathing beaches of your soul, to make them more usable, more serviceable, to make you more grateful to God, and gracious to man, more kindly disposed and more ... meek! Not in fluster or bluster or  social clutter  did they come, but meekly to Him, and were heard, healed.

You may need soul storms and afflictions to make you more bold. Bold ? Meek ? How, you may well say, could BOTH of these apparent opposites be in view as GOOD! It is in this way. You need to be both personally meek and for Christ, exceedingly bold. If you sink yourself into HIS service, then all your boldness is that of an ambassador, who humbling himself before his country, serves it without regard to his own self.

Here is the epitome of meekness, that instead of even CONSIDERING your own results and pay-check, you serve Him who is invisible, but whose wounds were exceedingly visible, and do so without regard to the power of the enemy or the shrewdness of those who worship and serve creation, not the Creator. As a mouth-piece and servant for Him, you rely on Him, and NOT at all on yourself, far less on verbal traitors; for the powers against you as you serve HIM are so far past your capacities as to make it an ant versus a lion contest.

Yet the ant can get into the lion's ear... and if it has to learn something… It is an ant bold for its message who so does; but it is one weak for its own life, meek for its own part, who dares.

The meek increase in joy, says our text in this context! and not simply this. It is IN THE LORD. You simply COULD NOT do this unless first of all, you yourself were to be found IN Him! (Colossians 1:27). Soon the inequitable bullies of this earth will be mere bellows set afire with their just judgment.

But as to the meek ?There is the joy of doing His will, of serving the most merciful of sacrificial beauty, in the Lord, of helping the afflicted, of helping to fix minds on the truth, of showing patients the cure of the King and calling them to receive it. Joy wells as you wait on the Lord, whose waters do not fail and do fill, to overflowing. There is the peace which comes like that of a vast lake which laps on the wooded shores, for you are now placed in the depths and loveliness of the love of God, which not only dispenses goodness, but takes care and has concern as a Father for His children (Psalm 103), for those whom He serves.

Joy! It is supernal, supernatural and at the same time, natural, for your nature is made for it, and your God is near you, so that created and increate alike, minister to you in a surfeit of delight. Duty may pain; truth flourishes.

This joy responds to response, it is sure in the steadfast, simple in the simple (Psalm 18:25-28); it invests the stricken with comfort and surrounds the persecuted with power (I Peter 4:14); it provides for the straying and calls to the weakened. Then, having increased in joy, you find this: The Joy of the Lord is your Strength! (Nehemiah 8:10).

It covers you like a mackintosh in rain, surges in you like a Spring gladdening a valley, conveys His thoughts to you like a perfume in the night. Thus strength chortles within your heart like a mountain stream that rejoices to bound down the mountain, looking to purify the air with its passing and to disperse drops into the light. Next week, DV, we shall present the Mark passage in this setting, and see this New Testament light shining in brilliant focus on the themes just considered from Isaiah. This will constitute Part II of “THE MEEK ALSO SHALL INCREASE THEIR JOY IN THE LORD”.