Reading: Rev. 14:1-5; John 1:29,35-37.
This
is the second actual view of the Lamb personally in the
whole revelation. We were seeing in our previous
meditation that the first is of the Lamb slain from the
foundation of the world, taking us back to those counsels
of God which were secured against all the subsequent
eventualities, the breaking in of adverse forces and of
sin. Here is the second view of the Lamb personally. In
the fullness of the times God sent His Son. Of course
there has been typology and prophecy previsioning the
Lamb. The features of the Lamb have been set forth in
numerous symbolic ways in the Old Testament and prophetic
utterances. But this is the second view of Him personally
and this is marked by a twofold “Behold!” “Behold,
the Lamb of God!”
The
first is a fuller utterance — “The Lamb of
God that taketh away the sin of the world”. That
seems to have been uttered in public. At that time the
multitudes were coming to Jordan to be baptized of John
and in a public and general and open way John made his
declaration — “Behold, the Lamb of God, that
taketh away the sin of the WORLD!” This is a
world matter.
But
the second occasion, where the final clause is not
repeated, is apparently to disciples, and now it is John
looking upon Jesus as He walks and he says to these
disciples, “Behold, the Lamb of God!” There
is that presentation of the Lamb for the world in
relation to sin and sin-bearing, but there is also the
presentation of the Lamb to followers as the pattern for
their walk — “He looked upon Jesus as he
walked, and saith, Behold, the Lamb of God!” It
was not only as the sin-bearer; it was “Behold the
Lamb” AS HE WALKED, and I think that takes us
right up to Rev. 14:4. The hundred and forty-four
thousand have, of course, beheld Him as their sin-bearer,
but they have also beheld Him as One to follow closely
all the way, following the Lamb wherever He goes. Whilst
we may be rejoicing in the first beholding, rejoicing in
the Lord as our sin-bearer, I trust it can also be said
of us all that we are beholding as John beheld on the
second day. There was a first day in our experience of
the Lamb; there was a first beholding. But there is a
second day and a day after for beholding, beholding with
a view first of all to seeing how the Lamb walks, and
then to following. The one hundred and forty-four
thousand were those who had done both.
God’s Lamb
“Behold,
the Lamb of God!” We will recall the words of
Abraham to Isaac — “God will provide himself
the lamb” (Gen. 22:8). God’s Lamb. He is
God’s Lamb before He is ours, God’s Lamb before
He is anything else. God had need of a Lamb, for in His
Son, in the great vocation and service, or transaction,
of a Lamb, the primary thing was accomplished of
God’s rights being honoured. God has rights, and
those rights are the rights of His eternal conception of
what man and the world, the creation and the universe
ought to be — seeing that it belongs to God, seeing
that it came from God, seeing that it was conceived in
the heart of God. He associated certain ideas and ideals,
standards and ways, a certain nature, with His creation,
and He has a right to all that, and His rights have been
taken from Him. He is not having His rights in man’s
nature and in man’s life, in the world and in the
creation, since that interference, since that terrible
diversion from God. The Lamb of God, God’s Lamb, as
the very first thing in His work, recovers and
establishes the rights of God.
God
has the right to absolute, unquestioning submission. That
right has been taken from Him, and we know — oh, we
know so well; it is the very plague of our hearts —
how in our very constitution there is that lack of
submission to God. What difficulties, what battles, what
agonies, we go through in coming into absolute submission
to God. It is our nature — it is not our deliberate,
conscious insubordination, rebellion or will against God,
but it is there in spite of ourselves, in spite of all
our desires; it is there, this unmanageable something
that is in the very nature of the creation which does not
submit to God. Utter and immediate obedience to God
— that is His right; and disobedience is the very
nature of man, it is shot through this universe. Selfhood
— we call it selfishness; it is selfhood. It would
take a long time to try to compass the whole round of
self-aspects. The Lamb — the very designation, the
very word, the very idea, is the opposite of all that
— it is the very picture of submission, obedience,
selflessness. God gets His rights of submission,
obedience, selflessness, in the One known as the Lamb.
The Lamb Laying Down His Soul
In Him
as the Lamb, as we have previously said, we can so
clearly see the complete reversal of the whole course of
fallen nature, the thought of God for man recovered,
humanity reconstituted on another principle — that
of the Lamb; a changed nature. It is not our nature to
lay down our lives. Remember that that very phrase about
laying down the life can equally well be translated
“we ought to lay down our souls for the
brethren” (1 John 3:16). We sometimes use the word
“life” in that connection so that it means
what, of course, it is meaning for many today on this
earth — just dying a martyr’s death, laying
down our life for the gospel of Christ in a single act.
But laying down our soul is a lifelong act, an every day
act, a thing which challenges our very disposition, yes,
our constitution, for we are immediately affected and
influenced by how men of this world will think. They will
say it is meek, weak, namby-pamby — you ought to
stand up for your rights, you ought to fight for your
ends; that is the way of the world. Take a view of the
world today and see what that is producing. But the Lamb
laid down His soul. When He was reviled, He suffered it,
He endured it, He answered nothing. “As a lamb
that is led to the slaughter, and as a sheep that before
its shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth”
(Is. 53:7). That takes some doing, that represents a
strength that is not in you and in me naturally. We have
another nature. You say that is weak? I say there is no
strength like it. You do not know what strength is until
you can stand right up against the whole nature of this
world and its judgments and standards and take the
opposite view and the opposite course. He did that. That
is the Lamb, laying down His soul.
To say
to these feelings of ours, these uprisings of our souls,
these strong hot feelings, these resentful feelings
— to say to them, Now then, you get down, you stay
under — that sometimes means a real battle when you
are taking everything into account, as to what it is
going to involve of cost for the time being, until God
vindicates that attitude.
“Behold
the Lamb”; follow the Lamb. The way of the Lamb may
be the way of the Cross and the crucifixion of the
natural life continually, but the end of that way is the
throne, and the throne is not some merely geographical
scene or spot. Do not interpret thrones in the Bible
literally. It may not interest you at all to sit upon a
literal throne — it does not interest me — but
to come to a place of spiritual ascendency where there
are values, where there is wealth, where there are
riches, dignity, strength, honour and glory to be
dispensed to others, that is something, that is the
throne — the end of the course of the Lamb, the way
of the Cross.
Beholding the Lamb Every Day
Behold
the Lamb walking, today and tomorrow and the day after.
So
many Christians have stopped with the first day. They
have beheld the Lamb, the sin-bearer, and they rejoice,
as we ought to rejoice, in Him as the sin-bearer. We have
stopped with that view, and today and tomorrow and the
next day and all the days following we still keep our
eyes on day one, forgetting that every day there is to be
a beholding of the Lamb in very practical matters. It
will require that you and I many times have to withdraw
from the scene, as being too much for our natures, and
get away with the Lord for a little while and fight that
battle out — the battle of our souls, of our
reactions, of our provocation. We may have to fight it
out and get clear and come out with the Spirit of the
Lamb, leaving it in the hands of the Lord to give an
answer in His own time. That is following the Lamb. The
Lamb repeatedly withdrew to be with His Father because of
the situation, because of what He was meeting. He fought
out the battle right to the end. He went a little
further. “He went forward a little, and fell on
the ground, and prayed that, if it were possible, the
hour might pass away from him. And he said, Abba, Father,
all things are possible unto thee; remove this cup from
me: howbeit not what I will, but what thou wilt”
(Mark 14:35-36). The cost was great. He fought it out
and came forth serene, with an amazing serenity,
resultant from that secret battle with His own soul. “He
poured out his soul unto death” (Is. 53:12).
The Lamb at Jordan
So
God’s Lamb is one that is wholly unto God. We see
here two aspects of that: firstly, as He came to Jordan
to be baptized of John, and John said, “Behold,
the Lamb of God”. That is the initial and
consummate attitude and committal. The Lamb slain from
the foundation of the world is now declaring publicly, in
the world, that that has, from eternity, been His
attitude toward God’s interests. “I am
come to do thy will”. I have not come to debate
it, to question it; I have not come to contemplate it; I
have come committed to it, fully, utterly committed. And
Jordan was but a declaration; it was not an acceptance of
the will of God — that had been done before the
world was; the Lamb was slain then. Will you just dwell
upon that statement — “The Lamb slain from
the foundation of the world”. What does that
mean? It only means this: that in the counsels of God,
when the great design of God, that eternal purpose, was
being “talked over” (speaking after the manner
of men), and decided upon, then the Father said to the
Son, “You know what is going to happen, you know the
challenge that is coming, you know the result of that
interference, that it will be an utmost cost to secure
what we are talking about now — it will cost us
everything”; and the Son said, “Father, I will
pay the price”. That is the slaying of the Lamb. The
Father said, “Very good, we will share it together;
it will be My cost and Your cost”. And there it was
that “God so loved the world that he gave his
only-begotten Son”. And when the Son came into the
world, He was only taking publicly, on this earth, the
position that He had taken then, and declaring it. It was
an utmost committal, a consummate attitude, declared at
the Jordan.
The Lamb as He Walked
And
then again, it was a matter of beholding Him “as he
walked”. The position that He had taken was the
position in which He remained every day, meeting the cost
of it. Every kind of test came to the position that He
had taken. The world tested Him, and I do not mean only
the world as a sphere and the people in it, but the
spirit of this world, the ideas and conceptions and
standards of this world, all so contrary to His. The
prince of this world betrays the standard of this world
when he suggests to Him that, by falling down and
worshipping him, He should receive all the world’s
kingdoms. The spirit of compromise — “If only
you will drop your level a bit and forsake your utter and
ultimate standard, if only you will do a little
compromising, you can get so much more; do not be so
utter, so absolute, so consummate, it is not to your
interests”. That is the world. He was up against
that all the time. He was tested by the world spirit, the
world’s concept, which is so completely different
from that of the Lamb.
He was
tested by the evil powers. Very often the evil forces
come nakedly, not through men and not through things.
They seem somehow or other to break right in upon us,
apart from other people and apart from other things, and
we sense an awful working of evil. It seems as though the
evil powers have got inside of us, ourselves. At other
times they are in other people, provoking us; now they
somehow seem to be working WITHIN. “Christian,
do you see them, how they work within?” Yes, they
do; that is how it seems. I am not talking about demon
possession in the case of Christians, but it seems
sometimes as though they have their grip upon our very
vitals. He knew soul-travail in conflict with the evil
powers; oh, if it were known what a secret history the
Lord Jesus had! We only read of His doings and His
sayings and see some of the incidents in His life, but
there must have been a tremendous secret history, battles
and conflicts and sufferings and issues being fought out.
He was here for that, but the position taken initially
was maintained day by day in His walk, in His going, in
His progress, and we must constantly in every situation
follow the Lamb.
Thank
God, we have not to fight this out alone. The Spirit
Himself helps our infirmity, we have One alongside, we
have the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, we have
grace which is sufficient. But nevertheless, it is a
bitter fight sometimes — this laying down of the
soul, this selflessness. “These are they which
FOLLOW the Lamb whithersoever he goeth”.
Firstfruits unto the Lamb
I
close by repeating that these are said to be the
“firstfruits unto the Lamb”. That is, in them
God’s rights, God’s thoughts, God’s
desires, God’s intentions have their first full
expression. These are they who have met in an initial way
the blaze, the heat, of ripening suffering, spiritual
suffering, and have responded. These are they who have
passed along that peculiar way where others have not
passed. I cannot explain this; I cannot tell you why it
is that the Lord does this — the operation of the
principle of election seems to be here also. Somehow or
other God has laid hold of certain people to satisfy Him
in a certain way, and He takes them through certain
experiences deeper than others. How sorry we feel for
people like that. We cannot do anything about it, we
cannot help them. We see them going through unusual
difficulties and adversities. Somehow or other, if
anything can go wrong, it goes wrong with them: if there
is any trouble, they are the people who get it. Of course
that may not be exclusive to such as we are thinking
about. There are a lot of foolish people about who get
into all the trouble that there is going. I am not
speaking of those. But there is no mistaking the fact
that there are people on this earth who have peculiar and
unusual experiences under the hand of God. They are
sometimes tempted to cry out against that hand, cry out
with the Psalmist, “Is his lovingkindness clean
gone for ever?... Has God forgotten to be gracious?”
Oh, the agony! Not every Christian goes that way.
Multitudes of the Lord’s children have an easier way
than that. But here are these in our midst who so suffer.
What is the explanation?
I
think it is the hundred and forty-four thousand — of
course, not necessarily that actual number, but a marked
out company, to be unto God’s satisfaction as a
firstfruits unto the Lamb. I do not see any other
explanation. Maybe we shall be given more light upon it,
but I do feel that this touches many of our questions and
problems. It is God’s intention to bring near to
Himself, by unusual methods and means, some to serve Him
and His satisfaction in a peculiar way. That, I think,
explains this company, and it may explain something in
our experience. The Lord make us in any case those who
follow the Lamb — as we have already seen, it is in
the present tense — who KEEP ON FOLLOWING the
Lamb wherever He goes.