Reading: Luke 2:25-35
"The end of all things is at
hand" (1 Peter 4:7).
I think it unnecessary to stress the fact
that not only by reason of time, but also by the clear
evidence of world developments, the above words from
Peter's letter are obviously very much nearer fulfilment
than when they were written. We have only to contemplate
some actual, present possibilities, which could develop
any day and issue in a very full fulfilment of the end of
all things. In a word, there is no doubt that "the
end of all things is at hand," that the turn of
the dispensation is near. The great transition from what
has obtained during this dispensation to what will obtain
in the next is approaching rapidly. If that is true, if
we are impressed with that, we should look to the Word of
God to see if it has anything to say to us as to what the
Lord will do at such a time; and we are not left without
very clear information as to the nature of things at an
end-time and as to what God brings forward as His supreme
work at such a time. Here, in the end-time represented by
Simeon and Anna and a company in Jerusalem, we have been
seeing something of those abiding spiritual features of
such a time.
Our particular point now is the matter of
service as represented by Simeon; Simeon and the service
of God at an end-time. We shall look at the service and
the servant, putting it in that order because it is the
service to be fulfilled which explains God's dealings
with the servant. You never know why the Lord deals with
you in certain ways until you know what He wants to do
with you; or, to put that in another way, the Lord's
dealings with us are prophetic of what He is going to do
through us and by us.
THE SERVICE - THE BRINGING IN OF CHRIST
IN FULLNESS
Here was Simeon. The service explained the
man, for, as we have so far seen, the service to be
fulfilled by Simeon was the bringing in of Christ in
fullness. Up to that time Christ had been made known in a
fragmentary way, by divers portions, in divers ways, here
a little and there a little. It had been a progressive
development of that which pointed to or symbolized
Christ. But now the end of those times had come - of
signs and symbols and parts and diversities. Now had
arrived the full, the whole, the complete Christ, the
Lord Himself; and Simeon was closely related to the
bringing in, and the presenting to the future, of Christ,
the embodiment of God's fullness. That was the principle
of his service, the thing for which God had reserved him
and kept him alive; and when there is a service like that
to be fulfilled, the bringing in of Christ essentially -
not typically, symbolically or partially but essentially
and fully - the course of the servant will be no
ordinary, easygoing course. The history will not be
simple. It will seem to be very complex, very
bewildering, very stressful. There will be all the things
in existence which would put the instrument out of
commission.
THE SERVANT
(a)
PREPARED THROUGH PRESSURE
You need only to read the story of the years between
the two Testaments to know at what a low level things
were when the Lord Jesus came in. There was plenty going
on of the religious system, but the real, spiritual,
essential value was very small, the state of things very
deplorable; and Simeon had lived long years through that
state of things and might well have lost heart. There was
plenty, I say, to put him out altogether. You know of the
political conditions of his day, which created a
well-nigh impossible situation in which to expect the
fulfilment of any testimony in glory. The enemy was in
the land and the people of God were in poor condition;
and much more. The inward spiritual history of this man
could have been no easygoing sort of thing, but must have
been full of testing and trying, and of much pressure to
put him right out. Strange ways with a vessel for
fullness! You would think that to be chosen for such a
purpose would mean that the history would in some way
correspond with fullness, would be marvellous and
wonderful, without any difficulty about it at all.
But it
is just the contrary. That vessel, chosen and reserved by
God to bring in a greater fullness of Christ, is a vessel
strangely beset and assailed by all sorts of
extraordinary things. It has a complicated course, in
which it would never be at all difficult to give up and
fade right out and say, 'The situation is hopeless!' The
way of this service that has to do with the fullness of
Christ is a way of great difficulty and perplexity and
anguish, of pressure and stress and seeming complication,
and ofttimes of apparent impossibility.
(b)
TESTED BY GOD'S HIDDEN WORKING
I want to say here that Simeon was but the individual
voice and actor in a corporate end-time ministry. We are
told here that Anna, who is a kind of counterpart of
Simeon, spoke to all those who looked for the redemption
of Jerusalem. There was evidently a company of them in
Jerusalem. It may have been, and doubtless was,
comparatively small, but there it was. There was a
company there, waiting, praying, standing for the
fullness of the Lord, and Simeon was but the voice and
expression of that corporate vessel. I say that, because
we do not want to think too much about the individuals in
this matter - considering ourselves as individual
Simeons. The Lord raises up a corporate testimony to
represent and bring in His greater fullness, and what is
true of the individual is true of the company. It goes
through strange, unusual ways of testing, of perplexity,
of adversity, of strain, and ofttimes its position seems
to be an impossible one. Just think yourself into
Simeon's position. All these long years he had been
standing, praying, waiting, longing, for the coming of
the Lord's Christ. Although the Lord Himself had spoken
to him and told him that he would not die until he had
seen the Lord's Christ, you know very well that under
certain conditions of pressure you are tempted to
question even what the Lord has said to you, and it would
not have been difficult now for Simeon, as an old man, to
have said, 'I wonder if I am deceived. Am I holding on to
an illusion? Nothing seems to be happening, there seems
to be no development, I am getting older and older, and
even the promises of God do not seem to be fulfilled;
what God has said seems to be no nearer realisation.'
Under stress you can feel and think like that. I have no
doubt Simeon suffered the same assaults on his mind as
other people of God have done in their relationship to
something precious of the Lord.
Do realize, then, that it is perhaps as a
part of a vessel, and not as being individually of great
significance, that we may be sharing the strange history
of that vessel and the peculiar pressure upon it, because
it is chosen of God to bring in a greater fullness of His
Son in a time when spiritual need is going to be very
great and very intense.
The ways
of God in Simeon's days were hidden ways. There was no
sign of anything, nothing at all that spoke of a mighty
work of God. That is the most testing thing - to be able
to live through and live on when it seems that God is
doing nothing about the thing you have been hoping for
and talking about. The signs are all hidden, the ways of
God are beyond our finding out. That is a very testing
thing, but it is in such testings that the Lord prepares
His vessel for that particular service.
(c)
REDUCED UNTO REFINEMENT AND EFFECTIVENESS
Now I have said that this was a very small
company, and that is borne out again and again by the
Word of God. At critical times, times of transition, that
is a feature to be taken account of. At an end-time, that
which is to be the vessel of fullness is in itself a very
small vessel. There may be the big thing, but that which
is really going to serve the full end of God will be
reduced unto refinement, as was the case with Gideon's
thirty-two thousand, who were reduced to three hundred
for that purpose. It was not a big company in the end,
not a mob, not a mass movement. It is like that and will
be like that at the end. That which is related to God's
fuller intention will be a comparatively small thing very
much refined, and the Lord takes serious pains to see
that it is so.
(d)
THE BONDSERVANT OF A DESPOT
Now when you come to Simeon in relation to that
service, you note, of course, that he speaks of himself
as the Lord's servant. There are two words here of
considerable significance. "Now lettest
thou thy servant depart, Lord, according to thy word, in
peace." As we have earlier intimated, the word
he used is the one used so often by the Apostle Paul
about himself. "Now lettest thou thy
BONDSERVANT..." "Paul, the BOND-SLAVE
of Jesus Christ." Simeon looked upon
himself as the Lord's bond-slave. And then, when he said,
"Now lettest thou thy servant depart,
LORD,'' he did not use the word that is usually
employed for Lord, but the word despotes, 'the
despot'. 'Now lettest thou thy bond-slave go free, O
Despot.' You see what kind of conception he had of
himself as a servant, and of the Lord as in the position
of complete mastery over him. We so often think of the
Lord as the Lord Whom we delight in; we like to call Him
Lord, but we do not often think of Him in the sense of a
despot. That word for us has an unsavoury element in it.
The Lord, the Despot! What I am trying to point out is
that, in the usage of this language, Simeon is looking
upon himself as the servant of the Lord under absolute
mastery. The Lord was his complete master, despot. He was
a mastered, a subdued, a subjugated man. For this service
of the fullness of Christ, the servant has to be on that
basis, a bond-slave, one in complete subjection to the
Lord. So much is this the case that here the Greek figure
behind the language is that of the slave who has either
been inherited or bought, and then branded; he cannot
take freedom unless he is either given franchise or
bought right out from his bondage by some superior
authority. He has no rights whatever. And Simeon is
saying, 'Now, Lord, let me go as Thy branded bond-slave;
give me my heavenly franchise.'
What a
conception of the servant of the Lord! It has to be like
that; to serve the Lord in any fullness, we have to come
there.
(e) UTTER HEART RESPONSE TO DIVINE
APPREHENDING
There were two intertwining factors in
Simeon's case. There was the sovereign act of God in his
apprehending, and there was the heart response of Simeon
to that apprehending. These two things work in both ways.
God acted sovereignly to apprehend him, and Simeon, on
his part, made a full heart response. Yet it also worked
the other way. Because Simeon's heart was so set upon the
Lord, the Lord laid hold on him. There is the great truth
of the Bible that back of all our spiritual history and
experience is election, relating, of course, not to
salvation but to service. That lies behind and before
anything on our part at all. And yet God looks to see the
attitude of our hearts before He will bring that election
into realization and express it. The fact does remain
that the Lord waits for something on our part, even if
only for an attitude, for reality - that we really mean
business with Him - before He can bring out clearly that
thing which He has foreseen and intended. When our hearts
are like Simeon's, wholly and utterly abandoned to the
Lord so that he calls the Lord his Despot and himself the
Lord's bond-slave, we discover then that the Lord has had
us in view for a long time, and His intentions concerning
us are brought to light. You see the intertwining of
these two things - the sovereignty of God and the
abandonment of our hearts. They are like two circles
turning in on themselves all the time. Do remember that,
because they are very important things.
(f)
CHRIST ALONE SERVED
Now life can only be definite and meaningful and
unified if it is mastered by one Master. The explanation
of the dividedness, the disintegration, the distraction,
the lack of cohesion and certainty and meaning, is so
often that we have not got a Master. Either we are trying
to be our own masters, or we are allowing ourselves to be
mastered by all sorts of interests and considerations,
and thus are playing into the hands of the forces that
are at work to destroy our lives. Our great need is of a
Master, a Despot, and to be found in utter subjection to
Him; what Paul (the man who knew all about this) called
'being apprehended by Christ Jesus.' That was Paul's
conception of his conversion. One day the Lord put His
hands on him, said, 'Now, Paul, I have got you; what will
you do about it?' and the wholehearted response, never
gone back upon, was, "What shall I do,
Lord?" (Acts 22:10). From that time, Paul called
himself the bond-slave of Jesus Christ, and the one thing
that concerned him was to be in subjection to Christ, or
for Christ to be absolutely Lord. If it is not like that,
life will be a confusion, a civil war inside of
ourselves. Unless there is one absolute Master, life will
be a misfit; we shall have missed the thing for which God
made us, until He is our Master.
Take
Paul as an example. Paul was making havoc of his own life
as well as of the life of many others while he was in
rebellion against the Lord, while he was kicking against
the goad. That became perfectly clear after the Lord got
the mastery. And what was more (and what is always true,
of course, where there is this lack of complete
subjection to the Lord) Satan was the driving force
behind Paul. He thought he was his own master, but he was
being driven; he was helpless before the drive of this
evil power. More and more that power of evil was
fastening on him and driving him on in desperation to all
lengths, involving great cost to himself and much
suffering to many others. Oh, what a lot then there is
behind this term that Paul came afterwards to use of
himself - 'the bond-slave of Jesus Christ.' All those
wild, tempestuous forces in his own nature, with which we
ourselves are so familiar, those forces that fiercely
rise up against the Lord and against all that is of the
Lord - all that riot of evil forces was brought into
subjection to Jesus Christ, and he could speak of himself
as His bond-slave.
(g)
NO SATISFACTION SHORT OF THE FULL DIVINE
INTENTION
Come back to Simeon. You see, Simeon was a man of
great interests. He has been traced by scholars to be the
son of Hillel, the great Jewish scholar who founded a
school of interpretation of the law. He has also been
declared to be the father of the great Gamaliel, at whose
feet Paul was brought up. If these facts be true, he must
have had a tremendous heritage, a wide field of interest.
But, for Simeon, the coming of the hand of the Lord upon
him meant that none of that - his scholarly interest, his
inheritance, his world, great and full as it was -
answered to the deepest thing in him; and it was that
same deep thing in him still unanswered, still unsettled,
that was his apprehending. We ourselves come to some
extent into this very thing when we find that, however
much there may be in life and in this world which
interests us and occupies much of our time and attention,
somehow or other it is not answering to something in us.
We may get as far as we can get in that, in success and
so on, and yet somehow even the best and the greatest is
still a disappointment: there is something remaining.
That is the apprehending hand of God, so that nothing
just 'fills the bill,' as we say: there is something
which has still to be met, some question still to be
answered, some compelling sense of our standing in
relationship to something more and higher. That is a mark
of God's having a greater purpose in our lives, for He
never lets us be satisfied with anything less than the
full object for which He has called us. We may think we
now have our field, but if that is less than all God's
thought we may explore and exploit our field but we shall
discover that we have not found all that in our heart of
hearts we know to be the answer to our existence, to that
sense of destiny, of Divine purpose, which casts an
emptiness and dissatisfaction upon all else. It was like
that, undoubtedly, with Simeon, and yet that something
else had not yet come actually into view. But the day
that it came, why, his whole world passed out as nothing.
He said, 'Now I have it, now I have arrived!' The day
when he held the child Jesus in his arms, he knew he had
his answer.
Have you had an experience like that? Do
you know something of what that means? - waiting,
longing, praying, feeling, and then the Lord brings you
into touch with that thing which is peculiarly of
Himself, and you say, 'This is what I have been sensing
the need of, this is it.'
That is the dealing of the Lord with a
servant of His, or an instrument, be it personal or
corporate, that is chosen for something more than the
ordinary, that is called unto the fuller instead of the
partial.
Let us then really face this whole
question of the Lord's need of an apprehended vessel to
bring in the greater measure of the fullness of Christ,
and ponder the strange spiritual history through which
such a vessel will go - the unusual dealings of God, and
the unusual interest of the powers of evil as they
concentrate upon putting that vessel out of action, upon
frustrating that purpose. Here it is so clearly
represented by this man.
You see, I feel the Lord is wanting to say
something to us at this time about the end which is at
hand, and of His concern to have a vessel that will serve
Him in this fuller way regarding His Christ in a time of
coming spiritual need; and of what, therefore, we may
expect as to our own experience, our own handling, in
view of our having to meet forces so unusual, the awful
drive of the enemy. How necessary it is for there to be
more than an ordinary abandonment to the Lord - coming to
the place where He is Master and Lord in very truth, and
where we are utterly subject to Him. Let us make this a
very definite matter of prayer. If we can at all discern
these signs, both as to the world and the coming phase of
things, as well as in our own spiritual experience, let
us see that they are of tremendous meaning, and get very
much to the Lord that He shall find us a vessel to hand,
completely under His mastery.