God is the living God, and as such He is acting in this scene of death. He came into the midst of it as the living God. He could not have come otherwise. We may say, He has not been here, if He has not been here as the living God; but His is resurrection.
If resurrection be denied, then, that the living God has been here, that God has interfered with the condition of this cursed heart-stricken world, is denied also.
It is blessed to see this, very sure and simple as a truth, and that has been the secret or principle of the divine way in this fallen creation from the beginning. Into Himself as the living God; into Himself or the resources which His own glory or nature provided, God has retreated, apart from a world that has involved itself in death.
Again, I say, this truth, this mystery, is sure and simple, full of blessedness, and that which, of necessity, has marked His way in this world. If His creatures have been untrue—His creatures of highest dignity, set by Him over the works of His hand—if Adam has disappointed Him, revolted and brought in death, surely God has to look to Himself, to draw from Himself, and then in His own resources in the provision which He Himself supplies, He finds the remedy, and this is in His victory as the living God, which victory is resurrection—His own resource of life in despite of the conquests of sin and death, let those conquests take what form they may.
I am looking only at one, but, I may judge, a very vivid sample of this.
Bethany in the neighborhood of Jerusalem—a village on the other side of Mount Olivet, in the Scriptures of the Evangelists, shows itself to us as a happy, sacred, and mystic spot. It was happy, for there the Lord Jesus found, if anywhere, a home on the earth. It was sacred, for there He had some of the most intimate communion with His elect, which His spirit ever enjoyed. It was mystic, for there He exhibited this truth or mystery which I am speaking of—His victory as the living God.
Lazarus, His friend in Judea, Lazarus of Bethany, had died. They had buried him—all that they could do—the service of a fellow-creature. The dead can bury the dead—right it is in them to do so, but it is all they can do.
The Lord was then absent. But He comes in due season to awake His friend out of sleep, to raise him whom his friends had buried.
He reveals Himself in full, suited character, the character suited to that moment, and in which He had come into this world. “I am the resurrection and the life,” He says.
Bethany at that moment afforded Him His proper material to work upon. Sin had there reigned unto death. Man had there just reaped the wages of sin. Lazarus had died. The sentence, “in the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die,” had not been canceled. That could not be. And now it had been afresh executed—on this elect one of God in the land of Judea. But the Son of God, the living God Himself, comes to do His work, as sin and death had just done theirs.
Bethany thus became a mystic place. It had now exhibited God’s great principle, the victory of the living God in this death-stricken world. This is the character it acquires under John’s Gospel; and in this character the Lord brings it in the same Gospel. I mean in the next chapters. There the Lord sits as in the midst of the risen family. He is at Bethany after it has acquired its mystic character.
It has been constituted the expression of God’s way in this world where sin is reigning, and now the Lord enjoys it. He is there as with the risen family. In spirit He is in the millennial world, and as the King sitteth at His table, the spikenard of His worshippers sendeth forth its goodly smell.
This was the first use to be made of Bethany, or of God’s own great and ruling principle, His victory over death, or His glory as the living God. He enjoys it in the bosom of His elect. (See John 11:1212Then said his disciples, Lord, if he sleep, he shall do well. (John 11:12).) He has, however, more to do with Bethany than this. If He first enjoys it in the midst of His own, He must also resort to it as His relief from the disappointment which He was suffering from all He had been trusting, so that He may get an answer as from Himself, and find satisfaction there, let all beside disappoint Him as they may. (This is seen in Matt. 21)
Jerusalem had at that moment disappointed Him. He had sought her as the chosen seat of royalty on the earth, and had offered Himself quite solemnly to her as her King; but Israel would not, and He retires to Bethany—an action simple in itself but full of significance, telling us that He has, in Himself, in His doings and victories as the living God, resources that will never fail Him and never disappoint Him.
This is full of meaning and of interest. But this is what He has been doing in this world from the beginning. Let death appear, let the judgment of sin be ready to be executed, whether in the garden of Eden, in the earth before the flood, in the lands of Egypt or of Canaan, in the midst of Israel, or, wider still, in the whole world itself, we can see Him acting as the living God; providing atonement for sin by the principle of death, and bringing forth a living people from the midst of the scene of righteous doom and judgment of death. Bethany had already been constituted this to Him, the witness of this; and now when away, when fresh disappointments from the creature whom He had trusted come, He uses Bethany in this character. And I may say, when He retired to Bethany, He retreated to Himself and His own resources.