Reading: 1 Thess. 1; 1
Tim. 1:4; Heb. 11:32-34.
It is not particularly the book of Judges
which is the matter of our concern, but the burden of
the Lord is bound up with that little clause at the
end of 1 Thessalonians 1:9, "a living and true God".
"Remembering
without ceasing your work of faith..." (1 Thess.
1:3).
"...to
serve the living and true God" (1 Thess. 1:9).
Knowledge of the Living and True
God
If we were to read through the first and
second letters to the Thessalonians, we should be
greatly impressed with the fulness, richness,
strength, victory, fruitfulness and effectiveness of
these Thessalonian believers. We have often remarked
upon it, and it is certainly something which calls
for remark, for some of the grandest and choicest
things said to believers were said by the apostle to
those at Thessalonica. He was able to say of them that
they were exemplary; that is, that throughout a whole
region their faith was spoken of and they were talked
about; and that they were an example; and by means of
them the Lord became known in a very extensive and
effectual way. It means the Lord was known to them in
no small and weak way. Their knowing of the Lord was a
very effectual and fruitful thing over this wide
region. They have been preserved by the sovereign work
of God as a testimony right down the ages, and are
before us now as a monument. When we come back to the
root of this matter, and ask how this was, what the
secret of the matter was, what lay behind it, the
answer is found in this statement with two fragments
brought together: "...your work of faith"; "...ye
turned to God from idols to serve the living and true
God".
Therefore, there must have been a point
at which these Thessalonians abandoned idols on the
ground that they believed, without any previous
history and experience or without being in possession
of proof that there was a living and true God. Here
were their idols, and there was this God of whom Paul
had spoken, to whom Paul was a witness. They had no
experience of that God, and they had nothing at
present in themselves to prove that He was such a God
as Paul had said. But they believed that He was a
living and true God, and without anything in their own
history to go upon they just took the step of faith in
what God presented to them. Abandoning their idols
they turned from them to serve a living and true God.
That all sounds very elementary, but there is no doubt
about its being basic to every discovery of God, to
every fragment of knowledge that He is a living and
true God.
In
the first place, witness is borne to you that there is
a living and true God. You have heard proclamation
made, you have heard a declaration that God is. There
is witness borne to God as Paul witnessed to these
Thessalonians. It has been found to be so by a
multitude who would give their lives for that
testimony. It is presented to you from the outside.
How are you going to prove it? How are you going to
know it? How is He going to become to you a living and
true
God? There is only one way, and you are pinned down to
it, but if you will accept it, you will know as truly
as these Thessalonians, and your knowledge of it may
be just as fruitful as was theirs. "Your work of faith",
in turning to serve a living and true God! Simple as
it is in words, it concludes the whole matter. There
is no getting out of it. There is no getting round it.
The slightest fragment of personal knowledge that God
is a living and true God demands an act of faith
towards Him on your part; not proof, not evidence, not
the answer to all your questions, not argument,
nothing whatever but an act of faith towards Him, to
serve Him. To serve Him is the giving of a very
definite, active aspect to faith. You have got to act
in faith, and faith is always faith if it is true to
the Word. God never, in this dispensation, comes out
and projects for us a kind of gangway across to
Himself in proofs and evidences. This is a
dispensation of faith, a dispensation appointed and
fixed by God. It is as though God had said at the
beginning of a certain period of this world's history:
"From this moment up to a certain time which I shall
fix, covering so many ages, so many generations, the
whole character and nature of things is one of faith!
I do not depart from that a hair's breadth, nor for an
instant! The character, the nature, the governing law
of this dispensation is faith. Try as you will, you
will never get Me off that ground." God has fixed it. No one will
ever find Him on any
other ground, by any other means. The past
dispensation was different! You had only to do certain
things and you discovered Him.
Go back to that time in the day of Israel
and it seems that they almost walked by sight. It
seems that the response of God to them was so instant,
and so demonstrative, so manifest, that they almost
walked by sight. But this is not that dispensation,
this is a dispensation of faith; fixed, immovable,
unalterable by God Himself. But, inasmuch as God has fixed
it, and will
not move from it, He will meet you on His own ground,
He will answer to His own condition, and if you come
on to the ground of faith you will know that God is a
living God and a true God.
You may batter yourself against the door
to know God in any other way, and you will batter
yourself to pieces, but once you take God's ground of
faith you discover Him. You turned to serve One of
whom you had no experience, no personal history, but
whom you believed to be. It has been proclaimed to
you, but the evidence of those who say they know and
have proved is all you have to go upon. You believe
that He is a living and true God, and you turn, and in
turning you discover God, and you have to say: "It is
true! God is, and God is a living God, and God is a
true God!" Then a history of knowing God has
commenced.
Let all who are within the realm of what
we have just said about the initial stage of knowing
God lay it to heart. It is the only way to know God in
a living and saving way in this dispensation. It is
the sure way. Whether we have believed or not, whether
we have turned or not, whether this work of faith has
been in us or not, we shall wake up in the end to know
that He is a living God, and that He is true - but
then it will be a different discovery. Ultimately you
cannot get away from the fact that God is a living and
true God. Let that fact be laid to heart by any who
are arguing, struggling, battering themselves in the
dark to find God. You never will, until you exercise
faith in God, until you believe that God is, and that
"He is a Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him."
If He is that God that you are looking for, He must be
that. You do not want a God who is not a rewarder of
those who diligently seek Him. You may have your idea
of the kind of God that He must be, but He transcends
all your highest ideas. You will never discover that
He is, and you will never discover what He is, until
there is a definite turning to Him in faith, which
says, without knowing, without anything to go upon:
"Oh God, I do not know You, but I believe that You
are! I abandon myself to You, that You may make
Yourself known to me!" That is very simple, but that
is the way in.
The principle applies all the way along.
You and I are still called to know the living God.
That is going to be our history all along, to discover
that He is a living God, and it is, of course, one of
the elements of glory in our Christian lives that we
do again and again come into the (shall we say)
surprise: we make discovery again and again that the
Lord is a living God.
That sounds as though we have been
doubting that the Lord is alive, but it is not that.
In some pressure, in some trouble, we have needed to
know the Lord. We have been going round and round that
‘Jericho', but not in faith. We have been trying to
get to know the Lord in this way, in this matter, to
be assured; perhaps pining and repining, groaning and
moaning, struggling and agonising; everything but
believing. Then one day the Lord shows us that an
attitude of faith in Him, calling for an act of
obedience, without any history, without any precedent,
through faith in Him in this connection, is required,
and when we turn and take that step of faith's
obedience, that step of faith in the Lord over this
thing, we discover He is a living God in that
connection. That is the romance of the Christian life,
that even those who know the Lord, and have very good
reason to know the Lord, and have a lot of history
with the Lord, of whom you might say that they are
established in the knowledge of the Lord, again and
again wake up to the fact that, after all, the Lord is
alive. That sounds strange, but it is true. The
discovery of the livingness of the Lord in multitudes
of different ways comes by fresh steps of faith in Him
in this dispensation of faith.
God locks us up to this, because this is
a dispensation of faith. It is as though He said, "If
you want to know Me in a living way more, and still
more, in new discoveries, every fraction of this
depends upon some fresh gesture of faith in Me. So I
bring you into all kinds of conditions which demand
faith in Me." It seems to me that the older we grow,
and the more we know of the Lord, the more difficult do
the tests of faith become. And it seems as though the
nearer the end of the course we get, the easier it is
for faith to give up from one point of view, because
the tests become so much greater and deeper, yet they
lead to something which is so much ahead of all that
has been as to the knowledge of the Lord.
Knowledge of God Based on Faith
Faith
is the law of this dispensation and God demands it for
the knowledge of Himself in every way, if
our relationship with Him is a true one. It is not
necessary, though it might be of help, to touch on
different ways in which this is so. The fact is that you
may be holding back from the Lord in some matter of
obedience for a long time, exercised about it, and
while you delay you are circumscribing and limiting
your knowledge and enjoyment of the Lord. All the
time witness is borne that if only in faith you take
that step of obedience you will find the Lord in a new
way; and then eventually you yield, and in the
obedience of faith in the Lord, because you believe it
is the Lord's will, you do it, and almost immediately
you make a discovery. The Lord is more alive to you
than ever He was before. There is a livingness about
your relationship with the Lord which is new, which is
fresh, which is added to all your past knowledge of
Him. All you have to say, the only way you can put it,
is that the Lord is a living God.
We are not dealing with doctrine. We are
not dealing with laws and regulations, which are
optional. We are not dealing with things being
imposed upon us as a system to which we must
adhere. We are dealing with a living God, and what we
discover is not some new gratification because we have
got over a difficulty; we discover the
Lord.
For
the testimony to Himself, God more and more needs
those who know Him as a living and true God. That
knowledge is going to be promoted by God by way of
tests of faith, and all those who are going to be of
the greatest value to God on this earth, in conditions
such as they are, will be those who have come to know
God by way of faith exercised in Him in the midst of
the most acute difficulties! We give our lives to the
Lord; in all honesty of heart we declare ourselves as
being on this earth for God and there is nothing which
has any place in our interest, consideration,
desire or ambition beside the Lord's interest. So far
as we know our own hearts, that is our position before
God: complete consecration to Him. Then we move as we
believe God leads us to move. The course of our
history finds us taking such steps, moving in such
directions, in such matters, as we believe are God's
will. We have prayed over them, committed them to the
Lord and then we have acted after prayer in a way
which we believe to be God's way. Then concerning
these very things we come into the greatest troubles
of our life, very often a terrible tangle seems to
come about because of those things. Everything seems
to say it was all wrong; God was not in it, had no
place in it. What are we going to do? How can we go
through life like that? We have trusted God, we have
been honestly here for God, and now in the things
about which we prayed, in which we had no personal
interest as far as we knew our own heart - and we
challenged God to root out anything that we did not
know - as a result of all our trusting God, and all
our committing to Him, we have come into this horrible mess, and
everything says that it was wrong, and God was not in
it. How are we going to get through life like that?
The issue is clear. If you are going to
be honest, if you are not going to hedge, you are
going to take one of two courses: abandon a life of
trust in God and take things into your own hand, or
(and there is no middle course), stand to it that God
is faithful, and eventually you will see a divine plan
brought out of all this confusion.
Humanly it looks like a hopeless
situation. There seems no redeeming it. We cannot
record it as being of God! Are we going to capitulate
to that? Or we may as well give it all up! If we take
that position we may as well say, "It is vain to trust
the Lord" and not do it any more. That is the honest
course to take if you are going to accept that level
of things. The alternative is this other thing:
"I seem to be in the most awful mess, and
everything seems to have gone wrong. My steps of
faith and trust in the Lord have brought me into an
awful confusion, and everything seems to be a
contradiction that God ever had anything to do with me
at all, but I believe God!" Out of this there will
come something which will make it perfectly clear
that, although it may not have been altogether God's
first directive will, it was His permissive will; and
something for Him, for His glory, comes out of it which
justifies it, and does not condemn the whole thing.
Take that ground and you will discover that God is a
living and true God, that in all this God is not dead,
He is not a false God, and not unfaithful.
Some of us know that this means an utter
attitude. We are either going under or we are going to
take this attitude. Such as are brought into that
position most deeply and severely, where they think
they have an overwhelming mass of seeming evidence
that God has failed, that God has let them down, God
never honoured their trust in Him, God never took
responsibility for their ignorance when they acted
before Him in perfect honesty, are those who, in the
intention of God, are to make the greatest discovery
of Him, and to know Him in such a way as to be of
tremendous value.
An Illustration
Take
a simple illustration of this in the case of the
apostle Paul in the storm on the Mediterranean. If
Paul had wanted apparent proof that he had made a
series of mistakes, that storm provided him with all
those apparent proofs. If Paul had sat down and said,
"I was a fool to appeal to Caesar! If only I had not
appealed to Caesar we should not have been in this,
and I have made an awful mistake! They tried to
persuade me not to go to Jerusalem and I insisted upon
going to Jerusalem, and now it is because of my folly
and my mistake that I am in this condition! This is an
ignominious end! The Lord has left us to our own
devices, the ship is going to pieces, and we shall all
be lost!" There was any amount of evidence to prove
that he had been wrong. What was his attitude? "I believe God,
that it shall be even as He hath said"
(Acts 27:25). I believe God! When? When neither sun,
nor moon, nor stars appeared, when a great tempest lay
on them, when the ship already was creaking and its
timbers parting one from another, when all hope that
they should be saved was given up. I believe God! What
was the result? The ship's company was captured. We do
not know how it was carried out, but we are told that
the Lord said that He had given Paul all them that
sailed with him. The Lord had put them into his hands
in some way. There was a trail of results, not the
least of which was the letters to the Ephesians and
Colossians, and one or two more, lasting over the
greater part of a thousand years in building up
saints, and causing us to continually believe in God.
Two ways were open to Paul. One was that
he could believe that God was failing him, to lose
faith in God, to capitulate to the appearances, which
were grim. Get into a Mediterranean storm and see that
there is no myth about it. I have seen ships in the
Mediterranean which seemed to disappear from sight,
and after what seemed like minutes have seen their
masts appearing again and coming up; mighty war ships
seem to have gone down with the waves. Now in the
midst of that Paul said, "I believe God."
We know something of that in our
spiritual experience. All hope that we should be saved
given up, neither sun, nor moon, nor stars appearing.
There is a spiritual counterpart. We know what it is
when the tempest is upon us. What expressive words
they are; "...no small tempest lay on us...". A
long-drawn-out conflict with spiritual elements, and
all the time the whisperings of the devil, "You have
made a mistake! You have gone wrong! You have taken
the wrong way! God has left you to your own devices!"
What is going to be our attitude?
Do not think that in speaking like this,
with this emphasis, we for a moment claim to be in the
position we say we have to be in; that is, the
alternative to abandoning everything. God needs that
which is a knowledge of Himself which is not a
meagre knowledge. And that knowledge is to be
possessed only through faith towards Him, which is
tested and maintained through these deep and dark
experiences.
It could frighten us, but we will not be
frightened. We know that God will not put upon us more
than we are able to bear. We know that we shall be
inwardly strengthened in the day of the test. The
point is this, that it is the definite, active faith in
God in the midst of all that seems to contradict which
is the way of discovering in a new way that He is a
living God.
Sometimes it seems that God is not living
in some matters, as though God were not livingly
associated at all. It is all a big test of faith. Then
when faith which has been tested takes a deliberate
attitude towards God, you discover that in that
particular connection, where God seemed to have no
interest, no concern, no relationship, He is, after
all, a living God. In that particular thing God seemed
to be away from you, and you have been tested. Now you
have discovered in a new way, in a specific connection,
that He is a living and true God. That underlies
everything.
It gives the key very largely to the book
of Judges again. Here are the representative members
of the judges mentioned, the men who stand out perhaps
most conspicuously: Gideon, Samson, Barak, Samuel, and
Jephthah. These are the judges, and it says that these
men did all that they did in the delivering of God's
people through active faith in God, when everything
seemed to have gone. Oh, what recovery it was because,
as we have pointed out, there was a state of things
where a great difference had taken place as to God
being in evidence. In the days of Joshua, God was so
marvellously in evidence all the time. Now, because of
this declension, God is not in evidence in the same
way. He is not right on the spot taking the
initiative. He is allowing circumstances, in a
sovereign and providential way, which are
exceedingly bitter and adverse. Then these men
exercise faith in God in the midst of those
conditions, with wonderful results. They discover that
God, after all, is not dead, as He seemed to be, but
is a living and true God, but always and only living
and true to nothing else but to faith.
Faith does not make God living, but faith
discovers that God is living. Let us not mix faith
with psychology, that if only you can believe a thing
is, it is. That is not the point. We do not make God
alive by faith; we do not make God true by faith; He
is infinitely more than we know Him to be. We shall
discover Him by faith, and we shall discover far more
as faith increases. The Lord make us men and women of
faith, not for our own deliverance, satisfaction,
justification and vindication, but because God needs
the knowledge of Himself here among men, and God needs
a vessel prepared with that kind of relationship to
Himself for administering in His coming Kingdom.