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Psalm 78 By Rob Nicholson

The children of Ephraim, being armed and carrying bows, turned back in the day of battle.
They did not keep the covenant of God, they refused to walk in His law and forgot His works
and His wonders that He had shown to them.
Now, if you weren't here last week, we explained how we were using Psalm 78
in exactly the way that Asaph is telling us that we should use it.
He says, I'm opening my mouth in a parable, it's called a maskel, it's a teaching psalm.
And he says that he's using parables or metaphors.
And I explained that at length last week, I won't go over it again.
Except to repeat the point of view that this is what you need to bear in mind.
He says, now look, for those of you who have the spiritual vision,
in the works of God towards Israel, in His interaction with them,
His calling of them, His preserving of them, even in His punishing of them,
they act like a template.
They're an interpretive framework given to you to read certain things off the face of history.
You can read through these verses in Psalm 78 and many other places
the history of God's dealings with the church, you see, along the similar kinds of lines.
We understood that God doesn't change.
We know His righteousness, holiness, His omnipotence, all these things,
God is unchanging and hence the application of His law is always invariable.
It doesn't mean that His administration of it doesn't vary in time according to the purposes of His grace.
What you've got here in this history of God's dealings is some assistance
to help you in understanding what's going on around you.
And look, as complicated as you could make human existence be,
or as complicated as you could make the question of evangelism be,
when you strip your basic human being down, I have this nickname and you'll probably get used to it,
I call the average human being outside of Christ, I call them Joe and Josephine public.
So when you see anything that I've said, I use the terms Joseph or Josephine,
I'm referring to kind of like the average non-Christian.
And of course these questions will occur to any confused Christian as well,
but they're three basic ones and this is what you regularly hear,
it doesn't matter whether it's from a professor at university or a bricklayer down the road.
That is, they've got three questions to put to you if you're a religious person.
What on earth is going on? That is, they're talking about life in general,
about human existence, what's going on on the earth.
They might even ask the question, or a believer might ask the question,
what in heaven's name is happening in the church?
You're trying to get some understanding and some insight into some of the curious
and puzzling things that you see actually go on.
And the third question is perhaps the deeply personal one,
what's going on in my life?
Don't you require, you take in pagan terms I suppose.
The leading mark of our time is that people are rushing off to their astrologers
and their fortune tellers and their tarot card layers in an attempt to find
some aspect of personal meaning for themselves, embedded in the universe itself,
or am I going to meet this person, am I going to win,
am I going to be financially secure as I grow older,
all these different kind of questions, they're all meaning questions.
And that's really what people's hearts and souls focus on.
I mean you can go along and try and discuss all these esoteric issues
about the nature of God and existence and they're all meaningless.
I mean people's minds are focused on these basic questions that puzzle them.
It's true of people outside the body of Christ and sadly,
because of poor teaching, it's often true of people in it
because they're not given these kinds of standard templates,
these ways to understand what is going on.
Because life can become a complete puzzle, you see,
unless you get some insight into how it is that God deals with His people,
works in history and has planned out your existence for your own good,
for the promotion of Christ's interests and your own good.
I mean take television.
I've seen the news provoke anxiety states in people.
You know this is in pagans, you often see this,
particularly in people who have anxiety attacks,
that you might see them in a clinic or a hospital one morning
and you could ask them a simple question like a train of events,
you know, when did you feel this panic or anxiety attack, come on.
You know quite often you get the answer,
well it's just after I'd just finished watching TV for a while
and you say, you know, was it the news?
Well yeah, strangely enough it was.
You know, it was the news.
It's odd how this happens and there are other things that happen as well.
But what is it?
Well I mean news events that you see on the television
are not presented in any systematic way.
They're not presented in the context of meaning
that people need to understand how one event relates to another.
And we take things for granted as Christians when we look at these things
but we often forget how disconnected they appear to unbelievers.
You know to them there's no God running a master plot down through history.
It gives them any kind of moral groundwork to interpret what's going on in the world.
So the world does appear as confused and puzzled and disconnected and out of control.
And no wonder it begins to invoke anxiety.
I mean you see a disaster portray somewhere at some time in the world
and you know it could happen to you at any moment.
That's if you don't believe there is a loving God in control of the universe.
All these things are possibilities and that's what real human anxiety grows out of.
The fear of possibility.
The uncertainty that exists.
The grayness that is out there.
There's no sense of any assurance that there is a God who is in control of these circumstances.
So you know I always say to people you know
well if I thought the way you did and if I believed what you did
I would consider your anxiety to be quite normal.
The people that you'd really be bothered about are those who are in the face of all these things.
This unrelatedness, this disconnection that exists in the world.
We're not anxious.
I mean they're the people that are what I call they're running on nominal.
They're no brainers.
You know they're investing in the flesh.
They've immersed themselves in material goods or some kind of obsession.
And those things never occur to them.
I mean the person who's got the anxiety is the person who's thinking.
They really are.
Because they're the ones who are saying this does not make sense.
And they're absolutely right.
And you know they put them in asylums or clinics or something.
And the first thing I tell them is well look you're the same one.
You really are.
You're not the crazy one.
You're the same one.
You're the one that's saying the world does not make any sense.
And I'm telling you that as far as the world's explanation for itself is concerned
you are absolutely right.
It does not make any sense.
What in heaven's name is happening in the church?
Now this is the question you can address to Christians.
And this comes back to our text actually.
The children of Ephraim being armed and carrying bows turned back in the day of battle.
Now this doesn't refer to any particular momentous historical event in Israel's war campaigns.
But it does refer to the northern tribes.
The phrase Ephraim is a collective noun that's used to refer to those ten northern tribes
in distinction from the tribe of Judah.
And at the time this psalm was written we know exactly what it was in reference to.
There are a few other indications further on that we'll have a look at maybe in a few weeks.
But Solomon took over the kingdom from David, right?
Built a great empire.
And then Solomon became an autocrat.
We know that. He became a fool in his old age.
Loved many women. Made lots of mistakes.
And basically how he ended his reign was as pretty much of an autocrat.
To maintain the great system that he'd set up.
Jerusalem and its religious system.
And the wealth and the palaces.
Everything that Solomon had accrued became an enormous economic drain on the tribes.
It really had.
And that's why after Solomon's death and his son Rehoboam took over,
the northern tribes sent a deputation down to Jerusalem.
Now they kind of figured Rehoboam will be a little bit more reasonable than his father Solomon.
And you will know from the story, if you can recall it,
that instead of consulting the older and wiser men about this,
Rehoboam, Solomon's son, consulted only the men his own age.
And he went back to these people with the message and said,
look, my father chastised you with whips.
I'm going to chastise you with scorpions.
And this is like waving a red flag at a bull.
The entire security of this nation militarily and economically depends on unity.
They should stay together.
And Ephraim itself was not the innocent party here.
We know that already there'd been the entrance of idolatry in the north,
setting up of separate places of worship distinct from Jerusalem.
And they had already pre-planned their civil action of rebellion.
Now Israel was at that time still surrounded by nations that were hostile to it.
And so the rebellion of Ephraim under Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, is interpreted like this.
Here is this vital point in Israel's history where its unity as a nation is vital
because it's facing the rising Syrian empire, the resurgence of the Egyptians,
and the Babylonians again rising.
And it's at this point in history that Ephraim breaks away from the church.
It removes itself from the temple cults.
And this is why Asaph, speaking from where he is in the nation of Judah,
speaks of this astonishing event.
The children of Ephraim being armed and carrying bows that's established as a nation,
given their defences by God, they turn back, they turn away, they break the covenant.
Because the covenant is vitally connected to Judah and Jerusalem.
This is not an issue about Rehoboam's control or Solomon's rule, any of those things.
It's the religious issue of the centre of Israel's worship in the temple.
And this is why it's brought up this way.
That you could set up a temple in Samaria, a high place up on Mount Hermon,
and it wouldn't matter to what extent you organised it along what you consider to be covenant lines in Scripture.
There would always be one thing missing.
And it was the one thing that was in that place in the temple, in the Holy of Holies.
You could copy, you could do anything you like, but there is no way that you could have that Shekinah glory there.
It was there in the temple at Jerusalem.
And that's what they turned away from.
What in heaven's name is going on?
I mean, now you look back and we have an explanation for that.
This puzzling event. Why would Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, the son of such a wise father,
with a good deal of the Old Testament already written and before him,
make such a stupid decision as to reject the overtures from the north?
Well, we also have this verse in there as well that says it was from the Lord.
It was from the Lord.
You see, God was working His own ways and secret purposes.
We can say in the event, from the interpretation we have in the prophets,
that what God was doing was, you know, the rebellion had already started in the north,
religion was being corrupted, they'd set up the idols to turn them away from the true God,
and God builds a fence around Judah.
I mean, His purposes related to the coming of Christ, He builds a fence around Judah.
You see, He's working out these secret purposes.
Well, what do we read in Deuteronomy 29 at this point?
We have the advantage of going back and looking through Scripture,
the Lord's explanation for this, but these people did not, okay?
The Ephraimites and all these other people caught up in this, they did not have that.
They didn't have a message from heaven that said it is of the Lord's will that this happens.
We get that later on.
See, the secret things belong to the Lord our God,
but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children.
What they did have was a revealed will of God, centred upon obedience and service to the Temple in Jerusalem.
That was the thing they broke.
I'll carry on with this point a little further.
You get to the middle of this and how it applies to individual circumstances.
In the general context of this Psalm, what's the subject of it?
Well, it's this.
The Psalm is about divine patience and long suffering in the history of God's dealings with Israel.
Now, think about that.
It's not a record of Israel's failure, it's not a record of Israel's triumph,
but it's a history of God's dealings with great patience and great long suffering.
Now, on the ground at that time, the mistake the children of Ephraim made was this,
that they mistook God's patience and long suffering for tolerance of their sins.
And that was a big error.
That was a major mistake.
We read in Romans that very point that the Apostle Paul brought up in chapter 2 verse 5.
Don't you know that the long suffering and the patience of God is intended to lead you to repentance?
Not to presumption, but to repentance.
And when you see God in the exercise of this long suffering and this patience,
because He seems to be tolerating something, does not mean that He will accept it.
And that's the mistake that Ephraim made.
They've set up these systems of independent worship, they were starting to feel their own muscles,
they thought they could exist quite contentedly as a separate nation,
and they mistook God's patience and His long suffering for tolerance or even endorsement of what they were doing.
You see, they claimed that they had the will of God on their side because of circumstances,
because of providences, because of the way things seemed to work out.
It seemed also obvious to them, we'll set up a separate temple cultus in Samaria.
It's all plain to us.
But that was clearly against the revealed will of God.
Clearly.
So they mistook that patience and long suffering of God for tolerance.
And the other thing they were doing is this,
and I'll explain how all this fits into your own experience soon enough,
because they'd abandoned the revealed will of God,
and when you do that you put yourself in a very difficult situation,
you have to begin to make sense of your circumstances,
what's going on in the world or in the church or in your own life,
in terms other than what's in the revealed will of God.
And the problem with that is that people largely begin to create their own excuses
and their own reasons for doing things.
And if you have a look at what this crowd were doing,
and it speaks of Israel's rebellion at different times in verse 19,
they said, you know, can God prepare a table in the wilderness?
This is when they faced hunger.
And they began to use rational religious procedure here
about how things should be done.
And you find it again and again sort of outlined in this Psalm,
in verse 20 there's another instance of it, you know,
where they're asking questions, you know, can He give bread?
Can He provide meat for His people?
How does all this fit in?
Well, you know, the Lord's supply was supernatural.
And I've, you know, a few of you have heard me preach in the sermons
about, you know, how when the Lord converts a new Christian,
or when, you know, He does a new work, He's very tender.
He's like a Father, you know.
He takes the new believer aside and He communicates all His goodness
and His wonder in simple terms, you see.
And as Israel was representative of the new bride like the husband does,
what does He do?
I mean, He takes His bride away.
He takes her into a secret place where He can communicate to her
all the happiness and joy that He has in her simple presence.
You see, that's what the Lord did with Israel.
That was a marvelous time and that's why you find the Lord reflecting on this,
you know, as He does, He looks back on that time in the wilderness
when Israel was holiness to the Lord, you know,
and the simplicity of their service and, you know, their backwardness
and their odd little follies.
But to Him it was a great sentimental point, you see,
because in the midst of all His creation,
in the midst of this place where sin had ruined His work by His grand design,
He'd taken this poor, weak, downtrodden people,
drawn them to Himself and communicated all the goodness of Himself in the wilderness.
Wonderful thing to Him, deep personal sentiment
engaged in the heart of God towards this people.
Now, you know, these are the elements that these people began to ignore.
The great privilege of being fed directly from the hand of God was taken for granted.
They began to whinge at the manna.
They came to dry places in the wilderness and they thought,
well, you know, can He provide water in this place?
So by this process of kind of gradualism, you know,
the way these people became the interpreters of their own situation
placed them in these great dangers.
And they began to sheet the blame elsewhere for the problems,
for the consequences they began to reap.
Where did they sheet them?
Well, you know, it was a pretty hazardous thing to start mumbling around the camp,
you know, that the Lord's directly responsible for this.
They tended to start mumbling at Moses and Aaron.
Now, the Lord took that pretty personally.
We know what happened in those cases.
You can't put your finger on these guys without touching me
because I've set them up there.
But the whole process that's set up that you see here is very subtle.
It's like blame transfer.
And this is, you know, kind of like this is the Garden of Eden dynamic of sin.
Take this, apply it anywhere you like.
This is what you find.
Listen to two people caught up in marriage bitterness,
you know, or any people in close relationship
and listen to the structure of the language they use.
It's like listening to, you know, massive efforts of self-justification.
One tries to...
I didn't do that and no, I'm not responsible.
You find there's this constant sort of jittery discourse going back and forth.
There's who's going to be the just one.
You know, humans do it instinctively.
Adam did it in the garden.
The Lord comes along and says, did you eat the fruit?
Well, the woman you gave, you know, you gave me the woman.
You did this.
I mean, immediate attempts of blame transference.
And unless you understand that this is a fundamental principle
that operates throughout, throughout any form of human experience,
you'll miss it.
Let me give you an example.
And this is why I think it's very important that you get the Bible's view
about how sin works and operates in the human spirit.
It works in the church and it still works actively in the church.
This transference is very subtle shifting of blame that takes place.
Let me let you in on a little secret.
And you don't have to be a psychologist to name it.
All you've got to do is have a reasonable understanding
of the doctrine of original sin and to know the dynamics of it.
But over periods of time where there isn't the exercise
of faithful, loving biblical discipline in any church
and people begin to develop problems in their personal life,
there is a very subtle movement of the transference of blame.
And it's from the leadership onto the people who are actually having the problems.
And it's so contiguous, so subtle, so directed in such a way
that it becomes oblivious to the people who are on the receiving end of it.
You see, they don't know what it is that's happening to them.
And they begin to develop explanations for their problems
purely in terms of their own personal failure.
You know, certainly, in all events and circumstances of life,
there are elements where we always have the contributing point.
I mean, I can't think of any single event or place
where there's been favour in my life
where I haven't had some kind of contributing point.
That's one of the first things that people come up to me and say,
Oh, you know, you're arrogant and you're all that stuff.
Yeah, that's true. That's always partly true.
I mean, I'm prepared to take the element of blame
that's assigned to me in these cases.
But in this event, what takes place in the working of original sin,
still, you know, sin capital C in the best of men is this.
If they're unaware of it, the transference begins to take place.
And you can go back to people and you can point out,
well, look, you know, you haven't been taught this.
You haven't been instructed this point about, you know,
there are secret things that belong to the Lord our God.
He doesn't reveal them. That is to do with particular circumstances.
But then the fact that these secrets, their existence, these providences,
men begin to use them as excuses for not doing anything.
These circumstances are unique or they're beyond my control
and because of ignorance of the word of God or unwillingness to apply it
because of fear, they're just ignored and laid aside.
And the transference then begins to take place.
Instead of it being a problem to be resolved,
let's go to the word of God and find out what this answer is,
you begin to create bad people.
You begin to create people with problems in congregations
and they begin to take it upon themselves.
I mean, believers are especially prone to do this.
And they become convinced within themselves
that they are the causes of problems in these circumstances
when really a long-term process of the transference of blame has been going on.
Something goes wrong in somebody's life.
Well, you know, it may be their fault.
And yet again, God's given the responsibility of teachers and leaders
to come along and say, well, look, remember I spoke last week
about the Barn of Gilead at that point?
You know, and the prophet comes along with a question.
He wants to know why these people are wounded and suffering
when God has provided for their needs.
So he comes up with a question.
Is there no Barn of Gilead?
Why are these people in this condition?
You leaders of the church, you have the means to be able to help these people.
Well, here you go as it was in Ephraim's case.
You know, well, you know, the Lord's working something here
that we can't understand and people take providences
and this element of the secret aspect of God's will
as excuses for doing nothing.
And that's never to be the case.
I say it for this reason.
Here's my primary evidence.
And you find this again, you know,
well, throughout Scripture you see it in Psalm 78.
It's a great logical consequence of wherever sin's in operation.
Think about this.
Wherever you see misery, sin's been at work.
Somewhere, somehow, the effects of sin have been at work.
That's just one of those consequences of those spiritual laws,
that there is no misery in the universe apart from sin.
So, I mean, you can begin to work your way backwards,
piece by piece, and find out what the causes of things are,
what responsibilities are.
You think, why can you do that?
Because you have this.
You have the revealed will of God.
And it's enough and it's adequate
and He's given it to you to work out these problems.
And if you come along and say,
well, you know, this problem is something that cannot be understood
or cannot be dealt with within the context of this book,
you create an entire arena of human hopelessness
where Christ cannot work.
You create an entire place where the Word of God cannot apply.
And you leave people in desperate positions where they believe.
They come to believe because of the tendency.
You know, we've got a tendency to take blame upon ourselves for our circumstances.
And we say, well, you know, this is my problem.
It's my fault, you know, and I have this situation.
And in this sense, they then become interpreters
of what the secret will of God is.
You know, what an awful responsibility to be on people.
You see, somebody comes in from outside and they say,
well, you know, these things are perfectly understandable
in the context of what the revealed will of God is.
There are consequences, there are outcomes
and there are ways to get out of this situation.
This is why men take this as an excuse to doing nothing at the church.
You know, I've used this as an example.
Men will get up and, I mean, who was it who brought it up first?
I think it was Andrew Blackwood at Princeton in the 50s
and then Adams brought it up again in the 70s.
He said, look, go and get yourself some of the sermons of the reformers
and have a look at them.
You know, this is sermons of Calvin and Luther and William Farrell
and all these men.
And now get some of the sermons of these good modern reformed men,
the men we love and respect,
and see if you can find out what the differences are.
I mean, the doctrine is the same, but something seems to be missing
from the sermons of this vast majority of modern reformed men.
They're not missing, interestingly, from sermons like Lloyd-Jones
or Ian Murray, they're actually men.
And Adams brings up this point, look at how they address the people.
You find them always using these modern guys, the royal plurals,
we, us, them.
In other words, they're speaking kind of amorphously up into the atmosphere.
They're not applying the word of God in the way it was meant to,
as though the word of God was not speaking directly to you.
And, you know, you think about this and you think,
oh, what, go back and you pick up Calvin and it's you.
He leans over the pulpit and he addresses the people directly.
He refers the responsibility and applies the word of God
in the circumstances.
And that's the problem.
So you can sit in a sermon and feel that somebody isn't talking to you
when you use those kinds of royal plurals.
And that's not biblical preaching.
You look at how the prophets speak.
It's a direct address to the people because the word of God applies.
And people develop this amorphous habit of speaking to nobody,
as though it doesn't apply.
And that's something that is not part of the word of God's tradition.
Why? Because fear, you're scared of looking somebody in the eye
and telling them the truth.
You're scared of looking somebody in the eye,
so you hopefully distance it all and you become an interpreter.
I'll just put the word of God out there and it will,
you know, in quoted scripture, it'll bring forth the fruit
that he wants and he desires.
But, you know, that's just a misuse of a text,
kind of a scripture.
Outcome.
Outcome of sin is always misery and unhappiness.
That's the case.
And if you see misery and unhappiness, you can trace it back.
I'm not saying that you've got a cure
or you've got an answer for everything.
There are elements of God's providence that are secret and are mysterious.
But when you look at a situation through the word that's been given,
that's adequate, that you read in 2 Timothy 3.16,
it's the means to be able to bring healing and hope to people, you see.
And when you adopt this position of thinking that you are wiser than God
or the interpreter of his secret providences,
then you rob people of the kind of hope that's there.
And that's one of the hardest things to do to people, I've found,
in speaking to them.
You know, you get people who have had all kinds of difficulties
in their Christian life.
However it may have started is of no interest to me.
What the primary concern is is that the joy and the happiness is gone.
Now that's an evidence of things that have gone wrong.
But they can be fixed.
These situations are not situations in which Christ is powerless
because he's given the men who are supposed to be doing the leading
and the teaching the way to show people the way out.
That's what shepherding really is.
You know, I'd be the last person to say I can solve everybody's problems.
But I do know that there's an answer.
And it's in here.
And you'll find it if you look hard enough
because God has promised that it'd be so.
So, you know, the fault in the church is this.
Just like Ephraim, they set themselves up as interpreters of their own circumstances.
They really think they're capable of understanding what it is
that's going on in the church.
And they fail to pay attention to what's revealed,
to what God tells them to do.
You see, it's that simple.
And it's so subtle.
You can fall into it so easily.
By no means am I saying that I'm superior to these men.
I'm saying that, by God's grace, I've watched enough of them fall
and destroy churches to know that that's exactly what's going on.
And they're not even aware of it.
I mean, you can wave this in front of them.
And they don't realise that what they've done
is just developed a highly effective system of blame transference
on the people.
Not us, them.
They're the troublemakers.
They're the people causing the stir
instead of picking up the scriptures and saying,
well, you know, sure, they're stirring,
but chances are we've made mistakes, too.
And you know enough about the doctrine of original sin to start looking.
Well, what's the evidence?
I mean, what's the evidence down through history,
you know, as I said, in God's dealing with the church?
Well, you know, diseases have symptoms and signs.
Doctors kind of divide it up this way.
You know what a symptom is?
A symptom is something that a person reports to you.
You know, they come in and it's not something that you can see.
You know, you come in and you say, well, you know, I've got a belly ache
and I've got a headache and, you know, I get dizzy spells
and the doctor kind of goes through this list
and he looks you over and what he looks for is actually signs,
some indication that there is a physical illness.
The sign is something he can see.
A symptom is something you report, okay?
That's a basic distinction.
But you see, when you see those signs,
I mean, there's no evident problem here of, you know,
some kind of physical problem and you look hard
and you say, but they still have all these symptoms.
Well, of course, you know, you're dwelling in this arena
of the moral and the spiritual.
But there's still genuine indicators that something is seriously wrong.
You know, I mean, you look out around and I'm speaking in very general terms.
As I've tried to explain to you, you know,
the experience you may have had in and around the city of Newcastle
in a lot of ways is unique.
There are similar experiences in different parts of the world, yes.
But look, I know of places where Christians live joyful, happy,
successful lives in the Lord Jesus Christ,
where the Holy Spirit is being poured out on churches
because of their obedience and they are blessed beyond any measure or dream
that people in this town would even begin to understand.
You see, and I look at this and I say, well, this isn't normal.
This is not what's right.
These are the people who should be experiencing these kinds of things.
And if I don't see the signs of health or the symptoms of joy
in the Holy Spirit, which is, you know,
we know what the fruits of the Spirit are,
well, you know, I've got to say something wrong here.
People aren't being fed properly.
They're not being helped.
You know, I can assign depth, but I'm not going to assign it
to some secret of God's will.
I'm not going to fold my arms and say, oh, well, you know,
how mysterious God's providence is in it now
and then I'm going to pick up the Bible and I'm going to use it.
That's what I'm going to do.
Okay.
He's speaking very self-assuredly here.
You know, Christians go through ups and downs in their lives.
That's true.
I've had tough times.
I've been unhappy in my Christian life and I've been unhappy,
sometimes because of my sin, sometimes because of misunderstanding.
Lots of different reasons.
But the idea that there is some consistent state
in which any Christian should live in unhappiness or confusion,
you know, as we're talking about here,
is only because there's a problem with understanding
what the revealed will of God is and applying it.
Now, I insist on that.
Why do I insist on that?
I'll finish with this.
See, I've gone on for my normal 40 minutes.
It's this.
It's the fact that Christ Himself prayed
in the section of His high priestly prayer this,
when He was saying He's praying to the Father before the crucifixion.
Now, you listen carefully to these words.
And this is why I say to people, the Christian life is meant to be
basically joyful, happy, peace, joy and the whole goes to a wisdom.
This is what your own master prayed.
And now I come to thee.
And these things I speak in the world,
now listen carefully,
that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves.
What's this peculiar element of joy that's supposed to mark the Christian?
Well, in Christ's own words, it's His joy,
fulfilled in themselves.
That is in their own experience.
Well, where are we led here?
We're led back to ask this question about what is this joy of Christ?
We're led back again into the wilderness,
into those secret places of the Most High,
where He drew out His bride from Egypt.
We're led again to those secret places
where Christ took His disciples aside from the crowd
and communicated His goodness and His teaching and His care and concern to them.
We're talking about that joy that held Christ to the cross,
the same joy that overcome that ordinary human torment and fear.
Like I said, who wants to be crucified?
Least of all is the Son of God.
Would you ever begin to imagine of being in that position
where the Father whom you have known and loved for all eternity
momentarily turns His face away from Him and doesn't answer?
What unspeakable terrors to be known to a being
who has never experienced in an eternal existence
one instance of a Father's frown.
I mean, it was totally unknown to him.
What carried him through this?
Well, this joy, as Scripture tells us, that was set before him.
And you see, what makes you bear up in the midst of all these circumstances
is this joy of Christ that he knows within himself now.
You know, it's not some struggling Christ sitting up in heaven
ruling over the nations with a rod of iron trying to keep things in order, running this.
It's a joyful Christ.
It's a Christ who is watching His mission be fulfilled
in the work of His Holy Spirit there upon earth.
It's watching sinners being drawn to Christ through that operation,
men being brought back from awful disasters of hell by the power of God.
That's the joy that excites His Son.
That's the joy that should be exciting.
You have my joy, He says, fulfilled in yourself.
Remember, as I've said, I've used this illustration before and I use it again.
What do we have upon the cross?
We have the Divine and the Human.
We have the Human and His suffering.
We have the Divine bearing up with a certain knowledge of who it is that He's dying for.
And you think about that.
That's the marvel of what the atonement is,
is taking place in a person who is infirmly eternal and unchangeable in his being.
That he has this capacity to be absorbed in the ones he loves,
as he holds himself to this place of time.
You see, it is you as the believer that he holds its position of joy,
that delight to take you to himself in separated fellowship
and all those things that might stain or distract you from his presence and from his experience.
You see, this is the joy of Christ,
known only to the bride that is drawn out into the wilderness,
into this place of peculiar fellowship,
to the believer drawn aside to gaze upon the wonders of his person.
You see, this is joy that they might know Thee,
the only true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sinned.
There you go.
You try and tell me that the Christian life is not meant to be one that is routinely joyful,
not merely in the face of troubles or suffering.
I'm saying it's meant to be routinely joyful in every place because of the presence of God in it.
Well, you know, there's the reveal of the will of God.
No secret about that.
It's written here in the book, isn't it?
There's the reveal of the will of God.
When people come along and they tell you,
oh, look, you know, bear up under these circumstances,
you know, stiff up all the liquid,
you know, don't bring that garbage to them.
You know, it's problem solving time here.
Let's try and get ourselves back in this position where we understand
that God has provided all things you need
for the resolution of your difficulties, your problems,
living as a believer on this earth.
Everything's there. Heavenly places in Christ, that's all said.
All great things to be worked out on earth.
There is a purpose in following out the fellowship of sufferings.
There is a reason why you've experienced everything you have in your life so far.
But there is, again, this point that overrides all,
that you might have His joy fulfilled in yourself.
You know, I don't know what's happening here, really.
I mean, you ring me up one day, next thing you know I'm going to lounge here, right?
Let me be straight with you.
You know, I've explained all this to you over weeks.
You know, there's no pen answers here.
There's no point looking at things in oppositional terms.
The real element to be understood and to be introduced
in the situation that exists in this
is that you people have to set the example
of leading others back in a path of genuine repentance.
That's the thing that's not the problem with this or that,
that system, that book, this idea.
What's been lost is this joy and peace in the Holy Ghost that comes from that.
Now, you know, next week when I stand up to administer
the Lord's Supper to you for the first time, really, publicly as an elder,
I am leaking you in a path of repentance back towards God.
That's what I'm doing.
I'm saying I'm not sufficient for these things.
Get all the good doctrine, system, whatever.
It isn't going to work, you see.
It's coming back into that secret place where God wants you to be.
It's coming back in repentance.
And if people ask, what is it you're doing?
Well, we're repenting.
And that's the only example we can set
because I'm afraid the mountain of sin and disappointment
and misery that exists in place is too much for me to overcome.
That's why I'm in the business of repenting and going back, you see.
The only thing you could use me as a leader for is,
well, you know, just watch how I walk
because that's where I'm walking back to.
And I'm not going to allow,
and it will allow the devil to start up controversy merely for its own sake.
I won't allow men to abnegate their responsibilities
and blame shift onto other people.
Won't allow that.
But at the same time, I want to be able to say,
well, look, this is the only way I know.
I know from my own experience at that point,
you know, where the Lord in His secret will and providence
can bring you to an emptiness, to an end,
where there is no answer available apparently in the help of any man.
And it's in those points, you know, as Abraham saw.
And remember, as believers, it's the same faith of Abraham you hold
and you've got to put yourself up on the mountain with him.
Here he is with a promise.
Here he is with the Son in whom the promise is embedded.
He comes up and he knows he must give.
He must give this sacrifice.
And what does he call this place?
He says to his son,
my son the Lord Himself will provide a lamb.
Knowing in Abraham's mind, he wasn't expecting any great form of deliverance.
He thought he'd have to go through with it.
It's a myth that he thought that, you know.
And what was this place called?
Well, you know, in the mount of the Lord it shall be seen.
I mean, at that point of the greatest distress,
when the church is prepared to acknowledge its helplessness
and its hopelessness with its psychology,
with its degrees, with its techniques,
with its so-called abilities and methods and ministries,
when all these things are laid aside,
the Lord will do his work.
Because that's the other secret I've been trying to teach.
He's not going to share his glory with anybody.
Nobody. You see, because it's his work.
It's his joy. It's his place.
Let us pray.
Lord, we ask this day that you would
communicate to us that yearning,
Lord, that desire to once again
walk in these paths of holiness and peace
and enjoy Thy company and Thy presence.
Lord, we return to be in the paths of repentance.
And next week as we assemble together in that place,
Lord, give us that communication of the Spirit.
We ask Him to be with us even this week
and prepare our hearts as we come together for the first time
to remember your death, your sacrifice for us.
Lord, we pray for all our friends caught up
in whatever distresses they find themselves,
that they would once again look to Thy Word with hope,
knowing that it does provide them answers,
that it will lead them out to the paths of joy
that wait for them in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Again, Lord, we present ourselves
and ask you to be our shepherd
and lead us into those pastures where you would have us praise.
And save us, O Lord, from the thoughts of men.
We ask for Christ's glory's sake. Amen.