Before we go on to the
next of these signs I just want to put in an important
word. This does not mean that anything else that is said
is not important, but this must be important as the
beginning of anything that we say. When we say so much about this
divine life, we are not just thinking about it as some
abstract element, but in its true relationship to the
Lord Jesus. Jesus Himself is this life and we cannot have
the life without having Him. It is not something separate
from the person of the Lord Jesus, and I would be very
sorry if there should be any thought that we are speaking
of some thing called life as apart from the person
of Jesus Christ. The life is the way in which the Lord
Jesus manifests His person - it is the expression of the
divine person.
That is a very
important thing, for it would be quite easy for some
people who want to find fault to say: 'You put life in
the place of the person.' Well, we have safeguarded
ourselves against that accusation. It is the person of
the Lord Jesus who is in view, but we can only know that
person by the Spirit of life, and the Holy Spirit, who is
the Spirit of Jesus, is the Spirit of life. It is not
that some abstract element called life is Christ, but
Christ personally is the life.
Now, having said that,
we can come to the second of the signs chosen by John.
Reading:
John 4:45-54.
The key to this
incident is in verses 52 and 53: "So he inquired
of them the hour when he began to amend. They said
therefore unto him, Yesterday at the seventh hour the
fever left him. So the father knew that it was at that
hour in which Jesus said unto him, Thy son liveth."
There are several
features to note in this story, and the first is that
this man of Capernaum was a king's officer and was no
doubt a Gentile.
Then we note his
courtesy toward the Lord Jesus. He called Him 'Lord' -
"Lord, come down ere my child die" which
was a title of honour and courtesy.
Then we notice his
refusal to be offended with the way the Lord Jesus
answered him. It did seem sometimes that He answered
people in a not very kind way. We saw how He answered His
mother at the marriage in Cana when He said:
"Woman, what have I to do with thee?" (John
2:4). On another occasion, when a Syrophoenician woman
came in her trouble He did not seem to answer her very
kindly. And here is this man coming in a very courteous
way and in great trouble, and Jesus just says: "Except
ye see signs and wonders, ye will in no wise
believe." But if you look more deeply into these
answers of Jesus you will see why He did it. Sometimes
the Lord seems to be very unkind. He is not really so,
but He sees that something is very necessary before He
can show His kindness, and that is that it is necessary
for us to be perfectly clear that it is not just the
benefit that we want, but Himself. It is not just faith
in what He can do for us, but faith in His own person. Do
we want the blessing, or do we want the Lord? The Lord
Jesus is always trying to get us to want Him, and that is
exactly what happened here. The man said: 'Lord, come
down. It is You I need. I cannot go on without You. This
is a matter of life or death.' The Lord Jesus saw that
that was his spirit - that he was not going to argue
about motives or discuss signs and wonders, but was
saying 'Lord, it is You I need' and He always responds to
that. Sometimes He seems to be unkind, but it is to find
out whether our hearts really want Him or only a
blessing. And with this man the result was that "Himself
believed, and his whole house".
You notice that the
word 'believe' is used twice here. When Jesus said "Go
thy way; thy son liveth", it says that "he
believed the word that Jesus spake", but it is
quite clear from the second use of the word 'believe'
that that was a belief with some reservation, or
difficulty, or question. I expect the man stood still for
a moment and had to ask himself a question: 'Now, if I
don't do what He tells me to do, then I am in a desperate
situation. I had better believe what He says. I will go,
and believe that what He says is all right.' But he was
not wholly committed. There is a kind of belief which is
not a wholehearted committal. At the end, however, it
says: "Himself believed and his whole house"
and this is complete faith, the kind of belief which
commits himself with all that he has.
Well, these are things
that we take note of as we go on, but we are really
dealing with this matter of life and its nature. It will
not take us long to get to the heart of this particular
sign. It is a very important feature of this divine life,
but it is very simple.
Just look carefully at
the story again. We have said that the key of this sign
is in verses 52 and 53, and it is the time factor. It was
one o'clock in the afternoon when Jesus said: "Go
thy way; thy son liveth" - and the servant
said: "Yesterday at the seventh hour". The
man knew that that was the time when Jesus said those
words. The Jewish day began at six o'clock in the morning
and ended at six o'clock in the afternoon, so the seventh
hour was one o'clock in the afternoon.
You will remember,
perhaps, other time marks in the Gospels. When Jesus
yielded up His Spirit to the Father on the Cross, it
says: "A darkness came over the whole land until
the ninth hour" (Luke 23:44). That was
three o'clock in the afternoon, when the sun ought to
have been shining most powerfully.
This time factor is
very important, especially in this sign. The Lord Jesus
said these words at one o'clock in the afternoon, and the
man had to journey, perhaps on foot, all the way from
Cana to Capernaum. He started on his long walk. Probably
when the sun went down at six o'clock he did not continue
his journey, for they did not travel after dark in that
country. So he went in somewhere to stay for the night
and started again on his journey in the morning. His
servants came to meet him. We do not know exactly what
the hour was when the servants and the master met, but
there was the whole of the rest of the first day, the
night, and some of the next morning between his meeting
with the Lord Jesus and this meeting. And there were many
miles between - a lot of time and a lot of distance; a
lot of time and a lot of geography: and the life disposed
of all that in an instant. All the time and all the miles
disappeared when Jesus spoke His words. The thing
happened at the very time Jesus uttered those words away
there in Cana - the life came in.
Apparently death had
been at work in this child for some time. The Greek word
which describes his condition is in the imperfect tense,
which means that he had got nearer and nearer to death.
It had been coming on for some time. When the man came
and said: 'My child is at the point of death', it was
just about to finish its history in this child. So the
time factor is here as well as the geography factor.
Jesus spoke the word and time and geography were no more.
It would not have mattered if that child had been six
thousand miles away, or if he had been on Venus!
This divine life is a
timeless life. It is eternal life, because it is in the
eternal Son of God.
John has told us, as we
have seen, that all this was to prove that Jesus was the
Son of God. How do we know that He is the Son of God?
Because He gave us eternal life.
Try this out on someone
else - on the Hindu Krishna, for instance, or any other
god in this world, and see if it will work half a mile
away. And see how long it takes to work. It never works,
even right on the spot. But we in this place today are in
the benefit of prayer hundreds, perhaps thousands, of
miles away. If we are knowing something of the presence
of the Lord Jesus and His life, it is largely due to
prayers many, many miles away. Of course, that is only a
human way of putting it. There are no miles nor hours
where the Lord Jesus is concerned. His presence means
that all those things go. He is God, and one of God's
characteristics is omnipresence. He is everywhere, at the
same time.
This is something that
we can put to the test. Why do we pray for people on the
other side of the world? Because we believe that Jesus is
more than time and distance. And His people who are
knowing the working of death can receive life by our
touching the Lord Jesus here. I feel that we, the Lord's
people, and the Lord's Church, have not used this great
value of life enough. We must believe that people on the
other side of the world are as near to Him as we are. And
how near to Him are we? He is nearer than hands and
closer than breathing.
And He is the same to
all His people, wherever they are. I said it would not
take long to get to the heart of this sign - but what a
wonderful sign it is! Jesus has only to speak a word and
all time and distance disappear. This nobleman's faith
touched the Lord Jesus and He drew it out. He put that
faith to the test. He really said: 'Do you mean business?
Do you really trust Me? Or is it signs and wonders that
you want? Do you really believe who I am?' All that is in
this test, and when this man believed Jesus, even if it
was in a weak way, He took that faith, which was only
like the grain of mustard seed, and through it the
mountain of his trouble disappeared.
The point is that faith
always touches the Lord Jesus, and so it touches the
eternal Son of God, the universal Son of God, the Son of
God who is greater than all time and all distance.
That is the meaning of
this sign. You see, when we are really 'in Christ', to
use Paul's phrase, we are always regarded as being
together, though we may be thousands of miles apart. The
Lord Jesus does not look upon us as being in this
country, in that country and in another country. He
Himself is the only country in this universe, and so we
leave our country and our own nationality when we come
into Christ. I think perhaps this is found in the fact
that this man is a Gentile. The Jews were exclusive and
said: 'We are the only people and our country is the only
country.' Jesus went outside those frontiers and touched
the world outside. This man was a representative of all
the nations, for he was a Gentile. In the Lord Jesus
every earthly division is removed. There are no British,
Swiss, German, French or Indian in Christ. He is only one
nationality and that is a heavenly one. He is only one
language and that is a spiritual one. He is the heavenly
country. No matter what we are here, in Him we are all
together as one man in Christ. All the earthly
distinctions of place and time disappear in Him. It may
take us a long time to travel about this world, though
men think it is a very wonderful thing to travel at so
many hundred or thousand miles a minute and get to the
moon in no very great time! But, dear friends, in this
very moment in Christ we can touch our brethren six or
seven thousand miles away.
That is a miracle. But
here is the sign of that miracle. This life is eternal
life; it is timeless; it knows no space; everything is
present when Jesus is present.
Let us just go back for
a moment before we finish. John tells us that Jesus did
these signs "in the presence of his
disciples" (John 20:30), and we have
already pointed out that in Matthew, Mark and Luke the
word 'disciples' is in Aramaic and means 'apprentices'.
To learn Christ is to learn this great secret. We are
apprentices in the School of Eternity and we have to
learn what Christ means in this way. Of course, we do
know something about it. Some of us have had very real
experiences of prayers being made for us many, many
hundreds of miles away and being answered for us at the
very time they were made. It is a wonderful thing to
learn that! That was what Jesus was teaching His
apprentices. They were able to say: 'Well, that is
wonderful! Here in one place Jesus speaks a word, and it
is discovered the very next day that at that very moment
the thing happened many miles away.'
I am quite sure that
this is one of the great things that came into the Church
at the beginning. You can see it at work in the Book of
the Acts. There, up in Caesarea, is a Gentile man who is
praying. Down here, on the coast of Palestine, at Joppa,
is another man who is praying. The prayers of both are
answered at the same time, and the result is that they
come together, and Jesus is glorified. Dear friends, what
does this mean to us? Surely this is something that the
Lord has put into our hands? If He is the carpenter and
we are the apprentices, He has put this tool into our
hands and is saying: 'Now go and make things out of this
wonderful power of divine life which is ministered
through prayer.'
There is much more in
this story, but we have just sought to get to the heart
of it. I think the Lord has revealed His secret to us,
and it is a wonderful secret to possess. We need not be
alone, wherever we are. Oh, what some of the dear,
suffering servants of God far away are knowing of help
from the Lord because we are praying here! Let us believe
this and use it. Let us bring glory to Him in this way.
We are going to leave
it there, but if these have been only a few words, not
taking a long time to say, it is one of the most
wonderful things that have been revealed by the Holy
Spirit. How great the Lord Jesus is! No time, but from
eternity to eternity. No limitation of place, but
everywhere.